The head of the Garda Road Policing Bureau has warned motorists “if you’re going to be speeding, we’re going to catch you.”
Chief Supt Finbarr Murphy was speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland on National Slow Down Day.
He explained that it’s a 24-hour campaign with the purpose of raising awareness of the important part speed plays in road safety and in reducing road deaths and injuries.
“We want to make the roads safe, but to the people who are in that small cohort who insist on being reckless - they’re the ones we want to get before the courts.
“That’s why we have the extra resources out.”
Chief Supt Murphy added: “When we went through the Recession the numbers right across the organisation were down, we had no recruitment, but we’ve started to rebuild that.
“Our target over the next three years is to bring the numbers up to over 1,000 people, dedicated to road traffic policing. Already this year we have put 87 people in, we put another 63 in. By the end of this year we will have an extra 150 people in our roads policing unit dedicated to implementing the road safety strategy that we have to make the roads safer.”
The strength of the Bureau fell dramatically in the last decade, from 1,093 in 2008 to 640 by the end of October 2017.
“We will have additional duties in the Garda Roads Policing Bureau. It’s a rebuilding rather than a rebranding of what we have. We’re putting in new human resources, new cars and one of the key elements we’re moving towards is to deny the criminals the use of the road network, so the people who are involved in crime are the same people who are not taxing their cars, not insuring their cars, and breaking the speed limits.
“One of our key functions now is to focus on those people. If they’re involved in criminality, rural crime or that, we’re going to intercept them through roads policing and put them off the road.”
Chief Supt Murphy said the Slow Down Day campaign will run right across the country. “It’s a complete variety of roads, we’ll have some on motorways, some on national networks, and some in smaller areas and towns and villages.
“Where we know there have been accidents. We’ve looked at the statistics, we know that people are speeding, we know the injuries, where the deaths are, and they’re the areas that we target and they’re the areas that we’re putting our resources in, but it covers the complete network of roads - motorways right down to small and rural roads.”
He pointed out that someone driving at high speed doesn’t have control of their car. “If they’re in a collision, or if they knock somebody down, you’re straight into the death zone there, if somebody crashes at that speed, they can’t control their car, they can’t react to the unexpected, and they’re the people we’re trying to target."