RSA: Road safety needs to come back to the top of political agenda
The Tipperary Tuesday Scene In Night's Collision Of
The Road Safety Authority (RSA) has said road safety needs to come back to the top of the political agenda as it seeks a meeting with the Transport Minister and Garda Commissioner to discuss how the rising trend of road deaths can be reversed.
RSA chairperson Liz O'Donnell was speaking as a three-year-old boy and his grandparents were confirmed to have been killed in a crash in Cashel, Co Tipperary, on Tuesday night. The boy's parents also sustained serious injuries in the incident.
The crash was the second accident in Tipperary to result in multiple fatalities over the last week.
Last Friday, four young people — Luke McSweeney, 24, his sister Grace McSweeney, 18, Nicole Murphy, 18, and Zoey Coffey, 18 — died after the car they were travelling in crashed into a wall on Mountain Road in Clonmel.
The three teenagers had received their Leaving Certificate results that day and were on their way to an exam results celebration when the crash occurred.
Ms O'Donnell said before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, the country "had been making progress" in bringing down the numbers of deaths on the roads.
This year however, she said the country had seen “escalating road fatalities”, with 123 road fatalities to date — an increase of 25 on the same period in 2022.
Ms O'Donnell said each road death was "more than a statistic", with each loss of life affecting "hundreds and hundreds of people".
She also expressed her condolences to the “entire community” in Tipperary, who were now facing yet more trauma.
She told RTÉ radio’s road safety needed to return to the top of the political agenda and she hoped a review of speed limits, currently before the Cabinet, would come through in reducing speed limits in urban areas and on rural roads in particular.
Ms O'Donnell also said multiple penalty points "should be the order of the day for people who are doing seriously dangerous driving" and that "more visible roads policing" was required immediately.
"I spoke to the Garda Commissioner last week about this and he has agreed he's very supportive and he agrees that we need to extend the speed vans to have more of those on the roads because clear evidence shows that people do slow down if the vans are there and they are a good deterrent.”
The RSA chairperson also called on people to think about their responsibility when they get into a car.
“We all have a duty of care to protect our passengers and to protect other road users. Over a quarter of the fatalities [this year] are young people.
Ms O'Donnell said the Government needed to act quickly and introduce "urgent measures" to reverse the upward trend in road fatalities.
"We could have up to 180 people killed this year. You know, that’s an average of 15 people a month being killed on our roads. These are preventable deaths," she added.
"And it's in all of our hands and all of our capacity to do this. We have a strategy. We have a Government strategy. It's an all-of-Government strategy.
"But we need the people to take ownership of that strategy and support us by taking their own personal responsibility."