Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This amendment would place an obligation on the incumbent Minister to require the RSA to publish certain classes of statistics on penalty point offences. While I appreciate the importance of the kinds of figures to which the Senator refers, I do not believe that Acts of the Oireachtas are the appropriate place for such a level of detail. We already have a provision in the Road Safety Authority Act 2006 – the Act which established the RSA – relating to statistics. Section 8 of that Act empowers the Minister of the day to "direct the Authority to collect, compile, prepare, publish or distribute to such persons (including the Minister) such information and statistics relating to road safety and the functions of the Authority, as the Minister considers appropriate". The same section also gives the RSA the power to "require a person who holds records relating to road safety or matters relating to the functions of the Authority, to give to the Authority such information and statistics" in order for the authority to carry out its functions.

I think it would out of line with the character of the legislation to require the RSA in primary legislation to publish one particular type of statistic out of all the data it might conceivably collect. It would also imply that there was something exceptional about these particular statistics which set them apart from all other information published by the RSA, such as statistics on road deaths and serious injuries. Besides, if we went down this road and moved from general RSA responsibilities for statistics to specifying what statistics to publish, I can fairly safely predict that it will become an open-ended matter of amending legislation to add the kind of detail which is really not appropriate to primary legislation.

The power already exists for a Minister to direct the RSA to do what the amendment asks. I am willing to consider directing the RSA to do this. The debate we had the last day in the House caused me to go and look for that information myself, and I welcome the fact it was brought up in the debate, but I would first like to consider it a little more. In any case, I would prefer to do it on an administrative basis, by order of the Minister from time to time, because the kind of statistics we want published or collected will change quite a lot from time to time, and I think that would be a much better way to do it than putting it in primary legislation.