Car crash culture: How driving bans are simply ignored

Evident contempt for the law, and a commensurate indifference to the lives of others, emerges from detailed research carried out by the Road Safety Authority into the behaviour of disqualified drivers.

The drivers surveyed were not those who had merely clocked up 12 penalty points, thereby earning themselves a disqualification by stealth - serious as that would be.

Instead, the drivers surveyed were those who had been disqualified from driving due to conviction for drunk driving and/or causing the death of someone else through their driving.

An extraordinary 97 to 98 per cent of these disqualified drivers do not surrender their licences when requested to do so by the RSA - as they are required to do by law.

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The agency assumes that, what it terms “a high percentage” – because it cannot quantify accurately the precise number – “continue to drive with impunity, ignoring their driving ban”.

No consequences

While it is a criminal offence not to surrender a licence when directed to, it is an offence that appears to carry no consequences and so is widely ignored in the Ireland.

Some of the banned drivers who carry on driving nonetheless are in charge of public transport vehicles - public and private buses, for instance. Others are behind the wheels of trucks and vans, the name of their employers’ company blazoned on the sides of the vehicle.

But the bus passengers, the employers, other road users and pedestrians have almost no way of knowing that the people driving these vehicles have been banned from doing so.

Because of this, the RSA wants to create a so-called name-and-shame register, a publicly accessible list of named drivers who have been banned from driving for serious offences and whose identities are publicised, in a manner similar to the tax defaulters’ list published by the Revenue Commissioners.

This is because while justice is administered in public, as per the Constitution, and anyone can be in a court to witness an individual being convicted and sentenced, there is no publicly accessible database of disqualified drivers, apart from sporadic and dispersed media reports.

At present, when a person is banned from driving, this is what happens.

Once the two-week period within which a banned driver can appeal their conviction has elapsed and the sentence stands, the courts inform the RSA, whose functions include administering driving licences.

The RSA then writes to the banned driver requesting the return of their licence.

Simply ignored

Most such letters are simply ignored. The RSA’s research showed that between 2012 and 2015, between 2 and 3 per cent of drivers complied and returned their licence; the rest – up to 98 per cent – ignored the letter.

If gardaí are requested to follow up by visiting the person’s home, they appear powerless in the face of prevarication, however implausible.

"Bar the guards getting a search warrant and entering your home to get a licence, what is to be done if someone says the dog ate my licence, or I've lost it?" asks RSA chief executive Moyagh Murdock.

The end result is that a large number of banned drivers, perhaps the great majority, simply ignore the consequences of their conviction and carry on driving.

An examination of the National Vehicle and Driver File (NDVF), the database of the State’s 2.6 million drivers and 2.5 million vehicles, show that, up to December 31st, 2015, there were 41,713 disqualifications applied to 22,674 drivers - evidence that many drivers had multiple disqualifications.

In the 26 months between January 2013 and March 2015, 521 drivers were already disqualified from driving at a time when they received a subsequent conviction for dangerous driving causing death or serious injury.

In 2015, 1,767 disqualifications were handed out to drivers with an extant driving disqualification.

A research report prepared by the RSA last August reveals that “over 7,651 drivers have multiple concurrent disqualifications on their licences, indicating they continue to drive while disqualified”.

Professional drivers

What the public and employers may find alarming are the statistics revealing the extent to which professional drivers ignore driving bans.

In the 18-month period from January 1st, 2015, to June 30th, 2016, 700 professional drivers were banned from driving.

However, over 100 of these (about 15 per cent) carried on driving.

How is this known? Because they all received Fixed Charge Penalty Notices (FCPNs) indicating they continued to drive, despite being banned.

Last year, up to the time the RSA research was completed, 131 professional drivers had multiple concurrent disqualifications recorded against them.

A further indication as to the widespread flouting of the law is evident from the fact that, on average every month, the Garda issues 150 so-called no driving licence summonses, about 30 per cent of which are against drivers driving while disqualified.

While it might be argued there is a corrosive effect of laws and court decisions being ignored with impunity, there are more serious consequences in the case of disqualified drivers carrying on.

In the five years between 2008 and 2012, 7 per cent of fatal crashes were caused by disqualified drivers. “That equates to between 11 and 14 lives per year taken by recidivist drivers,” according to the RSA research.

“It’s depressing reading,” as Moyagh Murdock notes.

The authority has consulted the office of the Data Protection Commission about creating its name-and-shame online list of banned drivers.

Such a list would alert employers, for instance, who might face a liability if, in the face of available information that one of their drivers was banned and they did nothing to prevent them driving, could be sued if that driver caused a further crash.

Social pressure

Family members of a banned driver, their friends and neighbours could also become aware of a disqualification, potentially adding further social pressure on the disqualified person to obey the law.

The commission has concerns that any list of disqualified drivers on the RSA website would not amount to an “intrusion into the privacy of the individual”, but it believes this can be overcome.

"Any public sector body that wants to publish personal details, or any sort of processing of personal data, has to involve a proportionality and necessity test," deputy commissioner Dale Sunderland said in an interview with The Irish Times last month.

Noting “it’s not for us to comment on the policy objectives of any proposal”, the commission has advised the RSA of what it needs to do apply a proportionality test to its actions (in other words, is the publication of a list of drivers for alcohol-linked and/or death-causing crashes commensurate with the public interest in doing so) and operate a code of practice, which is also publicly available.

The RSA believes its survey revealing the extent and nature of the problem goes a long way to meeting the public interest test and is working on a code of practice.

Killer behaviour

As a commentary with its research notes, “a significant number of lives could be saved through the initiative, as the threat of publication would deter people from engaging in killer driving behaviour”.

“Our legal advisers have done a draft privacy impact assessment and we will do a more formal assessment of what we believe will be the impact of what we want to do,” says Murdock.

“We will also have a code of practice guiding and explaining our actions and this will be on our website too.”

The RSA believes it could introduce its name-and-shame list without further legislation.

However, to legally fire-proof the proposal, the agency has submitted a draft to Government of an amendment that could be made during an Oireachtas review of the Road Safety Act which starts this month.

“We hope to get it into law before the end of the year,” says Murdock.

By that time and based on past performance, disqualified drivers will have killed somewhere between 11 and 14 more people.