A District Court judge has claimed GoSafe speeding vans “deliberately targeted an unjust speed zone” on a road in Co Kildare with “rich pickings” and are “shooting fish in a barrel”.
Judge Andrew Cody made the remarks before striking out more than 30 speeding cases at Portlaoise District Court related to the road at Clogheen, Monasterevin.
Clogheen, while in Co Kildare, is in the Portlaoise District Court area.
In a written decision last week, the judge said he has been “very concerned” for two years about “excessive” prosecutions by GoSafe for exceeding the 60km/h speed limit in an area covering 700m of the R445.
The road is about 12m-wide with a large margin at each side, he said. “There is one farmhouse and one house and one can admire the open countryside with horses, sheep and cattle grazing in the fields,” he said.
Total fines for Clogheen, representing 0.003 per cent of the road network, were €108,240 in 2022 when fines for the rest of the District Court area – the entire county of Laois – were €53,320, he said. The number of prosecutions for Clogheen was similar to those for the entire counties of Kilkenny, Louth and Mayo.
Local authorities, depending on road conditions, may set speed limits which depart from the default national standards, he noted. The Clogheen road was “exactly” the type of wide two-lane road where the speed limit, in line with Department of Transport guidelines, should be 100km/h.
A senior engineer with Kildare County Council recommended in July 2021 the 60km/h and 80km/h zones in Clogheen be increased to 100km/h, he noted.
The setting of any speed limit was “entirely” a matter for the council but he was asking it to review the Clogheen limit “as a matter of urgency”. The failure to review was “in dereliction” of its duties to citizens.
People were convicted over the past two years of travelling at speeds “as low as 67km/h” in the Clogheen zone, adding five penalty points to their licence. That speed on that road was, according to the council’s engineers, “safe” and, “in normal circumstances”, posed “no danger” to other road users.
Incompatibility between the posted speed limit and road characteristics can cause drivers to exceed the limit because they perceive themselves to be travelling at a speed which is safe “and in the case of the townland of Clogheen, in many instances, it is safe”.
While he accepted the fact the Clogheen townland “has historically been the location of fatalities” should be among factors taken into account in determining location of speed checks, he believed the “huge number” of prosecutions for the 60km/h Clogheen zone “has absolutely nothing to do with criminality and little to do with road safety and are driven not by safety but by targets, statistics and finance”.
Such prosecutions “have no place in this court” and bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
His conclusion was that GoSafe – which is contracted by An Garda Síochána in conjunction with the Department of Justice to provide and operate speed cameras – “deliberately targeted” an “unjust” speed zone in Clogheen “where there were rich pickings and, as the saying goes, they were shooting fish in a barrel”.
Having cited a Supreme Court decision concerning circumstances where a prosecution can fall short of the constitutional administration of justice, the judge considered each of the Clogheen speeding summonses before him in light of his remarks and struck out 32.
Nothing he had said, the judge stressed, reflected on the “good work” of gardaí who contributed to Laois having the lowest number of road fatalities in the State this year and who detect and prosecute cases in “a fair and proportionate manner” based on the need to keep citizens safe on the roads.
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