Road deaths - Major action needed to stop carnage

There is almost a depressing inevitability that this country’s appalling record on road safety will not, or cannot, be improved and we are to face unabated carnage indefinitely unless there is an overwhelming change in attitude to safety.

The Government has reached the stage where it has admitted that the target of reducing the number of road fatalities to 300 a reduction of 99 over last year will be very difficult to achieve.

Apart altogether from the deaths caused by road accidents, the consequential injuries can very often be life-changing, as was pointed out at a conference dealing with road accidents in Ennis yesterday.

It heard from a consultant in rehabilitation medicine that six of the eight children being cared for at the National Rehabilitation Hospital paediatric unit in Dublin were road traffic victims undergoing rehabilitation for brain injuries.

This was described by Dr Mark Delargy as a "startling" figure, as well as being a disaster, and he also pointed out that one-in-five patients being cared for in the hospital were survivors of road traffic accidents.

Successive governments have proved to be abjectly inept on a number of fronts in endeavouring to make our roads safer. They have failed to provide an adequate garda force dedicated to road safety, allowed the driving test waiting list grow to gargantuan proportions, ineffectual points and camera systems, to name just a few.

The present Government was indicted by the former chairman of the National Safety Council, Eddie Shaw, who, when he felt compelled to resign, accused it of being "criminally negligent" over the lack of implementation of its own road safety policy. It could, by implementing that policy, save 140 lives a year, he contended when he resigned at the start of this year.

So far this year, about 86 lives have been lost on our roads and that figure will relentlessly increase because, despite sporadic and seasonal campaigns undertaken by the gardaí, it so very obviously is not a priority despite Government protestations that it is.

It continues to highlight what it intends to do, such as introduce legislation for random breath-testing, a privately operated network of speed cameras, extension of the points system, and a dedicated traffic corps of 1,200 officers by 2008. By then, the number of road deaths and horrific injuries, will probably have spiralled.

What the Government is talking about should already be in place.

The scandal of the waiting list for the driving test is an example. Currently, there is an unacceptable number of people on it 130,000 and that list has been allowed expand over the years.

Late in the day, the Government it sought to out-source driving tests to private companies and it is now blaming a trade union, which was supported by an arbitration board, for thwarting this plan.

The list should have never been allowed reach the proportions it has because testing drivers is crucial to road safety, and always has been.

According to a European Commission study published last month, Ireland's ability to reduce road deaths was below average compared to other member states and it said that speed and drink-driving were still the main problems here.

While it is legitimate to blame the Government for its abysmal record on road safety, personal responsibility is a factor which cannot be ignored.