The chairman of the National Safety Council, Mr Eddie Shaw, has performed a signal public service by highlighting the disgraceful state of safety on Ireland's roads. In his organisation's annual report published yesterday he appropriately dramatises the figures by saying that 1,000 of the 62,000 young people who sat this year's Leaving Certificate will have been killed in road crashes by 2008, while 4,000 more will have suffered serious injury. This age group is clearly the most vulnerable in the community. And Mr Shaw sharply and justifiably criticises the Government for its failure to implement its own Road Safety Strategy, which would save up to 200 lives and many more injuries each year.
His remarks are directed against the Government as a whole as well as individual departments. He doubts whether the political will exists to tackle the problem of road deaths effectively. He goes on to say that "in the current environment of budgetary surplus there is no justification whatsoever for the delay in fully funding and resourcing this life saving programme." The council commissioned its own cost benefit report on the Road Safety Strategy, which showed conclusively that it would handsomely pay for itself in a short time. Mr Shaw wants to know why no one has asked the question of how the health care and accident and emergency systems would benefit if road crash admissions reduced by 20, 30 or 40 per cent?
Money needs to be spent in enforcement, in engineering and in education if these benefits are to accrue. That involves several different departments, including Justice, Health and Environment and requires determined co-ordination across them if these targets are to be achieved. Reducing excessive speeding and drink driving and increasing the use of seatbelts would go a long way. So would implementation of a penalty points system in which the severity of sanctions accumulates.
The most extraordinary and bizarre situation obtains with respect to provisional licence-holders. There are nearly 400,000 of these; despite a high failure rate there is no prohibition on those who have not passed the test, most of them young and inexperienced drivers who are responsible for a disproportionate number of fatal and serious road accidents. And in the meantime thousands more cars crowd out an underdeveloped road system each month.
These circumstances demand a rigorous and determined strategy from the Government. It should take full account of the proven shortcomings of existing policy, including the failure of speed checks and fines to deter an increasingly affluent motoring public. Mr Shaw's case needs to be answered if the Government is to retain credibility as the ultimate regulator. Where is the legislation promised over two years ago to implement the Road Safety Strategy? Why has the parliamentary time not been found to make a penalty points system a real priority? Why has progress towards developing a drivers' register and an integrated technology-based enforcement programme been, in Mr Shaw's all too appropriate phrase, "so deadly slow"?
Basic questions of political and administrative competence are posed by the failure to deal these issues promptly and directly. The voting public should take due account of these failings, as evidence mounts that the tradition of public insouciance about them is giving way to anger that they have been so incompetently handled.