Minister wants Garda visibility on lesser roads

Minister for Transport Martin Cullen has said the Government wants the majority of Garda traffic personnel deployed near dangerous black spots rather than on motorways.

The Minister said yesterday that he had made it "perfectly clear" to Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy that he wanted to see Garda "visibility" on the lesser roads. He said that the Commissioner was in agreement with him.

"It is not good enough to employ all the resources on the motorways, which are the safest roads. Clearly the vast proportion of resources available on the enforcement side will be deployed on the more dangerous roads - the lesser roads as opposed to the national primaries," he said.

Mr Cullen said that the issue was now an operational one for the Garda Síochána to decide where to have the resources deployed.

Mr Cullen also signalled that the Government will introduce a new system for licensing drivers once the current backlog of driving tests is dealt with next year.

"I am not satisfied that the licence regime we have in place really meets the demands that are placed on motorists, particularly the young motorist coming on to the road, in terms of their qualification to drive on the roads that we have now and in particular with the high density of traffic.

"I think that we forget that it was only a short few years ago that we had only three-quarters of a million vehicles on the road, it is now over two million. Our population has gone to four million and it is predicted that it will go to five million. So we have to have regimes and systems in place to give the best opportunities to young motorists when they come out on to the roads," the Minister said.

He said driving curfews for young motorists was one of the new ideas being considered but he did not want to pre-empt proposals which the Road Safety Authority and its experts may put forward for the new licensing regime.

Mr Cullen said that it appeared that a lot of young people who were involved in accidents had just obtained their full licence.

"There is a kind of carefulness about being out on a provisional licence but suddenly when people get a full licence they feel that they are qualified to do anything," he said.

Mr Cullen said he was confident that the Government's timeframe of the middle of next year for dealing substantially with the backlog of driving test applications would be met.

Mr Cullen was speaking at the official opening of the N7 Naas Road widening and interchange scheme.