What's wrong with Road Safety

What’s Wrong with Road Safety in this Country - Start with Inflexibilty and

Garda Enforcement Emasculated by Commissioner - And theres more!

Every single Road Crash Fatality is a deep tragedy for all concerned and ones thoughts and prayers go out to the families.But the basic question is what is going wrong here , what should we be doing that we are not doing, have we learned from the positive lessons of the past. Clearly we have not.

A simple direct question is – Who’s in charge of the Problem. The short answer is no one and everyone. What do I mean by this.

Two government departments, Justice and Transport control the resources. Dept. of Justice is responsible for the Garda Síochána in terms of budgeting  and resourcing. The Minister approves the overall Garda Policing Plan. Both Minister and Commissioner agree the financing of the GoSafe Speed detections vans to the tune of approximately €12 million euro per year. This almost a total waste of money because the system is grossly inflexible. The speed vans cannot be moved to emerging crash black spots due to contractual restrictions agreed by the Minister and the Commissioner. The Garda Road Policing Units have been decimated in terms of resourcing and the rest of the Garda organisation is severally under resourced. This means that garda visibility is at best nominal and at the worst non-existent. This is not the fault of the front line officers who would dearly love to have a central role as they once had.

The Department of Transport owns the “Speed Limits” piece of the jig saw at least on the national level. Local Authorities have significant powers in relation to local speed limits.

Then we have the Road Safety Authority which basically has no responsibility for the cutting end of Road Safety. It performs a wide range of administrative tasks and of course is responsible for well meaning publicity campaigns which have no relevance unless there is active and meaningful enforcement.

In short no one and everyone is in charge and finally there is the need for the exercise of meaningful personal responsibility by all citizens.

Activate to view larger image,