Irish Examiner View: Agencies must share road accident data
Bad Garda Farrell/rollingnews Picture: To Can A Leon Behaviours As Deterrent Act Visibility Driver Ie
Garda visibility has been the subject of much debate in recent months, and how much it can act as a deterrent to bad driver behaviours such as speeding, intoxication, and increasingly, cars swerving across lanes while drivers use mobile phones.
The debate has intensified as the numbers being killed on the roads climb higher. At the time of writing, news broke of two more fatalities: A man killed in a crash on the N25 near Midleton, Co Cork, and another near Listowel in Co Kerry.
As Cormac O’Keeffe reports in this newspaper, uniformed gardaí have now been told they must conduct 30 minutes of ‘high-visibility policing’ in their shifts.
The move follows comments on Monday by the head of the Road Safety Authority Liz O’Donnell, who said we need to see a significant ramping-up of visible enforcement to combat bad driver behaviour.
“It’s the missing link. It’s what we need. Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement," she said.
The move is welcome, coming as it does at a time when it is disturbing to learn that data on road accidents is not being shared with local authorities, as those authorities cannot make decisions to improve the safety of the roads in their care if they do not have up-to-date information.
Up to 2020, the Road Safety Authority was sharing such data with local authorities via an interactive map system, but when doubts were raised in the RSA as to whether it could share such data under GDPR, that sharing ended. The RSA then shared data with the Local Government Management Agency until the latter agency asked the RSA to cease, due to legal advice about its statutory ability to receive such data.
There are questions about the appropriate use of GDPR, which has become a catchword for organisations and individuals who wish to hide data, as opposed to its original intention of protecting citizens and ensuring their privacy when it comes to personal data. It has been pointed out that in this specific case, road traffic accident information can be circulated in a way that ensures personal data is kept secret. The Data Protection Commission has confirmed this point in a statement: “GDPR should not prevent the proportionate publication of crash-location details, particularly where any personal data element is largely anonymised/limited in detail.”
The more serious point is why the agencies have not shown more initiative to resolve the problem. The death toll is a crisis which all parties should try to solve urgently, rather than letting themselves be stymied by regulatory technicalities.
Among her findings after four years of research, Dr Cass has said that children have been “let down” by a failure to base gender care on evidence-based research, while she also called the safety of puberty blockers into question.
The NHS has already announced it will no longer routinely prescribe puberty blockers, which are only to be given to gender-distressed children as part of clinical trials.
This development has obvious resonance in Ireland. On the face of it, these appear to be powerful arguments against the widespread use of puberty blockers, but that is to reckon without the raging arguments which erupt any time trans issues are mentioned.
Dr Cass has said the toxicity of the debate is “perpetuated by adults, and that itself is unfair to the children who are caught in the middle of it.”
She is correct to underline the importance of children in this debate — children who are vulnerable, moreover.
The long-term health of those children cannot be compromised by treatments which do not have strong evidence to support their use.
The trans debate has become a playground for rhetorical extremism when following the science would serve some contributors far better. Nothing can supersede the proper care of vulnerable children.
Simpson is now remembered, however, for being acquitted of the murder of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in LA in 1994. The lengthy trial dominated US media for months and made a host of its participants famous — the likes of Judge Lance Ito, Johnny Cochrane, Kato Kaelin, and Mark Fuhrman will forever be associated with mid-90s America and its appetite for Simpson-related detail.
Even before his trial began, Simpson was in the headlines. He and a friend in a white truck were chased along the LA freeway and TV networks interrupted the NBA finals to show police cars slowly pursuing Simpson’s truck, with an estimated 95m viewers taking in the scene.
Simpson’s acquittal came despite strong evidence in favour of conviction, and there was no shortage of speculation on the role race had played in the jury’s deliberations — this was just three years after widespread rioting in LA after policemen were acquitted of beating Rodney King.
Simpson himself later served nine years for kidnapping, but that case drew nothing like the publicity of his murder trial, a mixture of media event and judicial process which electrified an entire nation.