Garda clampdown finds few Irish drivers break speed limits

A 24-hour Garda Síochána clampdown on speeding has found comparatively few motorists breaking speed limits.

Operation Slow Down, designed to raise awareness of driver safety, ran from 7am on Friday.

By the halfway point last evening, the Garda reported 355 speeding detections out of 88,423 monitored vehicles, a rate of 0.4 per cent.

The offenders included one driver travelling at 108km/h in a 60km/h zone in Bundoran, Co Donegal.

The Garda believe the high-profile campaign will help focus driver attention on behaviour and habits and lead to a reduction in road deaths.

"We can never afford to be complacent and say the job is done. A significant number of people still drive too fast at times," Supt Con O'Donohue of the Garda National Traffic Bureau said.

Operation Slow Down focused on Garda coverage of the road network.

Highly visible gardaí were deployed to monitor speeding with the aid of handheld laser devices, safety camera vans and in-car speed detection systems. GoSafe vans were also deployed.

“Excessive or inappropriate speed causes death and injury on our roads and remains the primary contributory cause of road traffic collisions,” Supt O’Donohue said.

“Slowing down keeps you and others around you safe on our roads, and although this is a targeted 24-hour operation, we appeal to drivers to always abide by this advice: slow down, save lives.”

Recent data showed the vast majority of speeding offences, 90 per cent, were more than 10 km/h over the limit. About 80 per cent fell between 10 and 29 km/h in excess of the limit.

Conor Faughnan of the AA said despite some cynicism among the public regarding the periodic nature of such enforcement, the operation was "an entirely constructive initiative and it deserves support".

“The Garda do these one-off days and they are an opportunity to highlight the issues which is a good thing because it gets people talking driving and driver behaviour.”

However, Mr Faughnan cautioned that despite the seemingly low level of offenders, speeding is more common on Irish roads.

"There is other data as well, that tells a slightly different story," he said, adding that National Road Authority (NRA) monitoring of driver speed, though not for enforcement purposes, shows people consistently breaking speed limits, by relatively small margins.