Road Safety - Cullen drags his feet amid the carnage

THIRTY people have been killed since Transport Minister Martin Cullen said there was urgent need for reform to improve road safety. A month has passed and nothing has happened about that urgent need.

Fine Gael spokesman Deputy Shane McEntee charged that Mr Cullen is procrastinating for no good reason, as we are entering the most dangerous time of year on the roads. There was a dramatic decline in road deaths with the introduction of the penalty points system. Road deaths, which had been 415 in 1999, were down to 335 in 2003, but little effort was made to implement the new system that had proved so successful. Only 3,000 of the 25,000 people charged with driving without a licence were convicted.

In 2002, a law was introduced to compel all drivers to carry their driver’s licence. At the time it was promised that a smaller credit-card- size licence would be introduced by mid-2003.