Hundreds caught speeding during 24-hour garda clampdown

A Garda operation to encourage motorists to slow down caught 451 drivers breaking the speed limit over a 24 hour period today and yesterday.

Some offenders were caught going almost 50 km/h over the speed limit.

Operation Slow Down, which was in effect from 7am on Friday to 7am on Saturday,monitored the speed of 115,000 vehicles nationwide.

The locations of almost 730 “speed enforcement zones” were made available to members of the public during the operation.

Gardaí produced a list of the most serious detections, which included a vehicle travelling at 148 km/h in a 100km/h zone on the N55 in Westmeath and another going at 108km/h in a 60 km/h zone on a regional road in Bundoran.

Operation Slow Down was rolled out to coincide with National Slow Down Day 2015 in association with the Road Safety Authority.

It was designed to remind drivers of the dangers of speeding, and to be aware and comply with the prescribed speed limits.

"Excessive or inappropriate speed causes death and injury on our roads and remains the primary contributory cause of road traffic collisions," said Supt Con O'Donoghue from the Garda National Traffic Bureau.

“Slowing down keeps you and others around you safe on our roads, and although this is a targeted 24-hour operation, we appeal to drivers to always abide by this advice: slow down, save lives.”

Gardaí conducting the checks recorded a compliance rate of 99.6 per cent, and the AA's Conor Faughnan labelled the operation as "constructive" in improving attitudes towards speeding.

“The Garda do these one-off days and they are an opportunity to highlight the issues which is a good thing because it gets people talking about driving and driver behaviour.”

However, Mr Faughnan said despite the seemingly low level of offenders, speeding is more common on Irish roads.

"There is other data as well, that tells a slightly different story," he said, adding that National Road Authority (NRA) monitoring of driver speed, though not for enforcement purposes, showed people consistently broke speed limits by relatively small margins.