Committee refuses to discuss crashes

THE DEATHS of three young people in car crashes on roads in the west of Ireland cannot be investigated or discussed by the Oireachtas committee charged with road safety.

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport has refused a request to hear allegations that temporary road surfaces were at least partly responsible for the crashes in which three families lost three daughters.

The Farren family of Carndonagh, Co Donegal, the Gallagher family of Achill, Co Mayo, and the Keane family of Ballylongford, Co Kerry, all claimed road conditions and signage were at least partly responsible for the deaths. Last November the families addressed the European Parliament’s petitions committee, outlining the circumstances of the deaths.

The efforts of the families to raise the issue of road surfaces, particularly temporary road surfaces, with the European Parliament last November, were the subject of an RTÉ programme entitled Mr Farren Goes to Brussels, which was screened in January.

Fine Gael MEP Jim Higgins, a member of the petitions committee, who has raised the matter on a number of occasions with authorities both in Ireland and Europe, said the Europeans had serious concerns about the practice of road surfacing in Ireland.

"They took this very seriously and asked that the national parliament hear the family's concerns," Mr Higgins told The Irish Times.

“As a result the petitions committee wrote to the Oireachtas committee on transport asking that the families be heard.”

However Mr Higgins said he was horrified that committee chairman Frank Fahey could not accommodate the families.

“It is simply unbelievable that Frank Fahey’s transport committee – which espouses a ‘major interest in road safety’ – should choose to ignore the plight of those whose suffering and loss has resulted from unsafe and substandard road conditions,” he said.

Mr Higgins stressed the families were concerned only that “the grief visited upon them due to inadequate road surfacing and signage would not befall other families”.

“It is quite clear that it [the committee’s decision] is laced with contradiction – on the one hand it acknowledges that the transport committee has a ‘major interest in road safety’ while on the other hand it refuses to allow the right of audience to three families who lost daughters in three different accidents.”

The Joint Oireachtas Transport Committee said the request from the petitions committee had been brought to its attention at a meeting on February 10th, but it was “not within the remit of the committee to investigate or deal with individual accidents”.