Fergal Browne (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister. As an Opposition Senator I should be happy to be able to prove the Minister and the Government wrong. However, I take no pleasure in saying that the penalty points system is no longer as effective as it was initially. Thirty more lives have been lost in road accidents since the penalty points system was introduced and 30 more families have been devastated.

When the Minister addressed the House last year he said, "I would like to be here this time next year to say that the second six months were as good as the first six". Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Minister was warned of this danger by the National Safety Council. In a press release last September, while expressing satisfaction that the number of road deaths had decreased, Mr. Pat Costello of the council said, "It will be a struggle to sustain the road safety gains made in recent years and months. This is because the Department of Finance does not appear to have a public expenditure allocation process to support investment in road safety." Unfortunately, Mr. Costello has been proved right in that regard.

Deputy Enda Kenny issued a document at the beginning of this year in which he highlighted the fact that the cost of carnage on our roads, apart from the huge emotional trauma, is in the region of €500 million per year. This cost must be reduced.

The Joint Committee on Transport recently heard submissions from the Garda Síochána, the National Safety Council and the Departments of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and Transport. Every member of the committee, from all political parties, made the point that the Department of Finance does not understand that the more money the Government spends on road safety, the greater the economic return. The Department of Finance appears to view road safety as being just like any other project. We must persuade the Department to alter that opinion because car crashes have a devastating effect, emotionally and economically. I wish the Minister for Transport well in his daily rows with the Department of Finance in this regard.

The Minister for Transport is not totally to blame for the difficulties we face in this area. The problem is wider than that. People now spend many hours every day travelling by road. Road traffic has grown by 73% since 1980 and nearly one quarter of all households have two or more cars. That 55% of people travel to work in their own cars is a symptom of a poor public transport service. House prices are so unaffordable that Dubliners are forced to move to Carlow, Cavan or Athlone and to spend hours travelling to and from work. The Irish Independent published a series of articles recently entitled "Generation Exodus". One of the articles stated that 34% of the working population take less than 30 minutes to travel to work every day; 39%, approximately 113,000 people, take between 30 and 60 minutes; 17% take between 60 and 90 minutes; 7% take more than two hours; and 3%, approximately 9,000 people, spend more than three hours travelling to work every day. The national spatial strategy has failed to deliver in this area and we are forcing people to live long distances from their place of work.

People are bundling their children into cars at 6 a.m., sometimes still in their night attire, to bring them to their grandparents' in Dublin, who get the children ready for school. While the parents work, the grandparents collect the children from school before the parents return to the grandparents' house at 5 p.m., and off the children go again. It is an horrific and unsustainable lifestyle. The Minister must use his influence at Cabinet to promote proper planning.

The Minister's speech was disappointing and contained nothing new. While he referred to the driver testing and standards agency Bill, this is no more than a plan. The Minister hopes to have the Bill complete by the end of this Oireachtas term whereas it was promised that it would take effect months ago. I am glad the Minister has taken on board the Fine Gael proposal on regulating driver testing agencies. The previous situation was daft and partly explains the huge variations in pass rate figures around the country. Athlone had the lowest first-time application passes at 43.5% while Shannon had a pass rate of 68%. Counties Cavan and Carlow did poorly despite County Carlow natives being, generally speaking, the cleverest in the country. Something is wrong with this.