Road safety - Action from ministers is long overdue

IF the Government is serious about reducing the appalling carnage on our roads, it should take on board the no-nonsense Australian strategy, outlined at an international conference yesterday, which has prevented hundreds of deaths.

With each new fatality here the Government comes in for angry criticism, and deservedly so, over its ineffectual handling of this crisis.

Apart from the occasional garda blitz against drink driving in festive seasons and bank holiday weekends, the authorities have utterly failed to address one of the country’s biggest killers.

Coalition policy has proved so inadequate that the chairman of the National Safety Council Eddie Shaw resigned in frustration recently. In an Irish Examiner interview at the time, Mr Shaw accused the Government of being more interested in treating road safety as a political football than in saving lives.

So far this year, despite all the promises to reduce fatal accidents, 76 people died on our roads up to last night, the exact number during the same period last year.

Against this depressing backdrop, the National Roads Authority is to be commended for hosting the two-day conference where experts from Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Britain and America are advising leading Irish specialists and Government representatives, including Transport Minister Martin Cullen, on ways of reducing road fatalities.

They heard how the Arrive Alive! strategy, designed by the state of Victoria in Australia, streamlined the activities of key bodies through an umbrella group involving the police, the justice department, plus the critical agencies responsible for traffic management and road infrastructure planning.

It was to prove a landmark turning point. As a result the number of deaths in Victoria plummeted from a high of 1,100 a year in the 1970s to the current low of 330 a year.

Before the radical policy change, the Australian regime had more or less mirrored the Irish situation. There was a general lack of co-ordination of the planning and implementation of policies, with each agency responsible solely for issues under its direct control.

Another strategy which ought to be considered here required probationary drivers to maintain zero blood alcohol levels in the first three years after licensing.

Professor Ray Fuller of TCD complained of Ireland’s lack of independent statistics on the complex issue of road fatalities.

He estimated that 15% of all motorists drive in excess of 20 km/h over the limit, that 14% of motorists drive dangerously and that 90% of them are males.

In a further departure from the Irish experience, delegates heard that several years ago the Australian police embarked on a highly successful crack down on drink driving, which involved a five-fold increase in random breath testing.

Ironically, eight years ago, when the last international conference - The Road to Safety - was held in Ireland, experts from Australia urged the Irish authorities to introduce random breath testing, to deploy speed cameras on a country-wide basis, and to bring in a penalty points system.

A potentially effective penalty points system has since been introduced but it has been allowed to fall into disrepute due to lack of enforcement. To this day, relatively few speed cameras are in operation.

Finally, after years of empty promises, the gardaí have only just been cleared for random breath testing.

This scenario amounts to a damning indictment of Government failure and illustrates the urgent need for an integrated approach to address the appalling carnage on Ireland’s roads.