Feargal Quinn (Independent)

A number of Senators spoke yesterday about the tsunami disaster which occurred on St. Stephen's Day and about the good response of the Government and the Irish people. However, what we are doing will only at the very most bring the situation in the stricken areas back to where it was. We must take this opportunity to consider how one might eliminate poverty from those areas. The Government has made commitments in the past to which it has not always lived up and it now has an opportunity to do something. Dóchas, the association of non-government agencies, is calling on the Government to use this opportunity to force a change in national and international policies.

I will touch on one other aspect of deaths over the Christmas period, namely the number of deaths on our roads. Last year the figure was 29 for the few weeks from before Christmas to the end of the year and that figure has jumped to 42 for the same period this year. We hoped we were getting somewhere in the past but seem to have gone the other way. The number of drink driving arrests also increased this Christmas as did arrests for speeding. I think there were some 19,000 charges for speeding over the Christmas period.

We know there are answers and we have seen that we can do something about this. Just before Christmas we discussed in this House the introduction of the metric system speed limits and we came up with a number of ideas to address the speeding problem. Will the Leader give attention to this matter and consider inviting the Minister for Transport to the House so that we can debate the matter in the immediate future because it is something on which we can take action? The longer we leave the problem without addressing it, the more deaths will occur.