Campaigner for reform of drink-driving laws

Presenting Gertie Shields, who has died aged 85, with the supreme award at a 2013 ceremony, the then chairman of the Road Safety Authority, Gay Byrne, told those present that Shields had "contributed to the sea change in attitudes towards drink driving in Ireland".

“She has since,” he added, “become one of the most recognised and admired campaigning names against drink driving as she took her message to the airwaves and print media across the country, and across generations.”

Gertie Shields’s life, however, encompassed several other notable achievements apart from her campaigning on road safety.

She was a councillor in Balbriggan for 15 years. She raised nine children, and then, after the early death of her daughter Deirdre, three young grandchildren. She campaigned with the Justice for the Forgotten group over the still unresolved Dublin and Monaghan car bombings of 1974, one of the victims of which was her aunt Concepta Dempsey.

Propelled into action

Gertie Shields was very much a private, married woman when the death of her daughter Paula (19) in a car crash, and the subsequent handling of the case, propelled her into public action.

Paula Shields had died, with two other girls and three boys, in February 1983 when the minibus in which they were travelling was hit by a car driven by a drunk driver. When the case came to the Circuit Court later that year before Judge Frank Roe, the man concerned was given a two-year suspended sentence and a 15-year driving ban.

Just before that case, Judge Roe had sentenced a sheep rustler to six months’ imprisonment. The contrast between the two sentences brought, firstly, Gertie’s son David to his feet to ask the judge “are sheep more important than people”? Mrs Shields then reminded the judge that “that’s my daughter you are talking about”.

In the days before victim impact statements in court, the judge put Mrs Shields in the witness box, where she asked him who would see to it that the defendant would stay off the road for all of the 15 years. Judge Roe answered that he would see to it; in fact, the man’s licence was restored seven years later.

In 1986 Mrs Shields and others launched Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), which had 10 basic demands.

Several of these, including progressive reductions in alcohol limits, compulsory testing for drivers involved in accidents, the inclusion of drivers’ photographs on licences and a legal onus on publicans to determine the age of customers before serving them, eventually became law, and annual road fatalities since then have more than halved.

Gertie Shields next entered politics, standing as an Independent for both Fingal County Council and Balbriggan Town Commission in 1994. Successful for the latter authority, where she topped the poll, she retained her seat at every subsequent election until her retirement in 2009.

Common good

Fellow councillor Monica Harford said this week that “what you saw was what you got” with Gertie Shields and that she was prepared to support any motion by other councillors “if she thought it was good for the town”. Her fellow councillors presented her with the Freedom of the Town Hall on her retirement.

Issues which particularly concerned her were bad planning, concerning which, Harford recalls, “she had a bee in her bonnet … and always maintained that Balbriggan needed a better mix of private and public housing”. She was also concerned about the care of unaccompanied children who were asylum seekers.

Gertrude Ita Mary Dempsey was born in Drogheda, one of five children of Vincent, a District Court clerk, and Kathleen, a seamstress.

After her father’s early death in 1937 she was unable to progress beyond primary school level and became, like her mother, a seamstress, eventually marrying Gerry Shields, a warehouse manager at the Hampton textile mill in Balbriggan.

Predeceased by her husband in 1998, she is survived by their seven surviving children, Geraldine, David, Mary, Derek, Aideen, Evelyn and Vincent, and by grandchildren.