Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As everyone in this Chamber knows, one death on the road is one family, one community and one group of friends devastated by the loss of the person involved. Every death is something we need to take seriously and take steps to address. As we work towards reducing road deaths to zero, we do so in the context that they have actually increased in recent times. That is unacceptable and difficult to explain, even though there have been attempts to explain it. The reality is that in each instance, there is someone who did not accept responsibility for the role they had to play on the roads in terms of ensuring the safety of other road users.

When we debate road safety, I think of a road death that happened within the past 12 months literally around the corner from where I live, at the corner of Glenageary Road in Mounttown and Kill Avenue. Greta Price-Martin, who was 22 years of age and a student of film at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, was killed there last April. She was cycling on her way to work at an incredibly busy junction where five roads meet. She went straight on and a lorry that was outside her turned left and she was caught under it. Her death was unspeakably tragic. I met her parents at the scene at a vigil afterwards. She was from Louth originally but her parents, Breffni Martin and Vanessa Price, were there. It is incredibly difficult for any of us to understand the grief they must have felt when their daughter was far from home. This, however, is just one instance in my area of hundreds around the country where people suffered similar grief. Anything we can do to stop that is something we must do. We must take responsibility.

The answer is not to simply say that we are reducing speed limits on small roads nationally. I have heard other speakers indicate that this all comes down to enforcement. The only time people are actually going to take speed and behaviour on the roads seriously is when they think someone is going to catch them doing it and penalise them. This can be seen on major national routes and motorways or on small country roads and small housing estates in urban areas. Wherever the setting, if people think they will get away it, they will take the chance. Every time it happens and someone dies as a result of it, we hear of the tragedy but what we do not hear is the requirement for personal responsibility. While I do not necessarily oppose it, one of the difficulties I have with saying all speed limits are going to be reduced from 80 km/h to 60km/h or from 50km/h to 30 km/h is that it abdicates individual motorists from the responsibility for taking action about their behaviour and for taking responsibility for the people around them, such as the vulnerable road users, pedestrians, cyclists and older people. All of that must be taken on board as an individual responsibility by motorists, motorcyclists and cyclists.

In my area, the increase in the number of cyclists on the road has improved awareness of vulnerable road users. I welcome the fact that bike share schemes and more individuals taking to bicycles onto roads throughout the capital and in Dún Laoghaire have made motorists more people aware of their presence. That has got to be a good thing. At the same time, however, while I praise Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council for the work it has done in improving cycling infrastructure, it is far from adequate and far from finished. The junction to which I referred earlier in respect of Greta Price-Martin is one where it put bollards in place instead of a segregated cycling lane. Those bollards have to be routinely replaced because lorries and large vehicles knock them down. The use of bollards is not working. Until we have that adequate cycling infrastructure in place, cyclists cannot and will not feel safe. For example, I cycle along the Rock Road in Blackrock into town. There is a bus lane that has to be shared with cyclists. It is intimidating if you are on a bicycle and you have a double-decker bus bearing down behind you because, obviously, I am not the fastest cyclist in the country. It is very intimidating sharing a relatively limited space with an enormous and dangerous vehicle. We need to be putting in place proper segregated cycle lanes rather than advisory cycle lanes or ones with those bendy bollards that can be knocked over by cars. We need cycle lanes that provide a separate space for cyclists in order that they can be safe and separate from traffic. For example, when transferring from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council into Dublin City Council, there is a complete lack of continuity in the infrastructure, particularly for cyclists. That is true on the Rock Road, Merrion Road and on the N11 where the cycle lane immediately deteriorates where Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council's area of responsibility ends and one enters Dublin city. These are just a few individual examples.

What we have on a nationwide basis is a problem with addressing the fact that people need to be protected, particularly vulnerable road users. We need to ensure that the engineering and the infrastructure is there and, beyond all of that, that we have the enforcement. We need to send out the message that if people are going to break the road traffic laws, there will be consequences for them and that An Garda Síochána will be there and they will be caught and there will be a punishment for them. Only then will misbehaviour stop and lives be saved.

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