Kerry County Council is to consider appointing a road safety officer to deal with driver education and road safety in the county.
Cllr Michael O'Shea (FF) proposed the appointment amid growing concern over the number of road deaths in the county which has reached record levels and is more than double that of four years ago.
Chief Supt Liam Hayes, the new chief superintendent for Kerry, yesterday expressed alarm at the number of deaths and said that tackling the issue was his priority.
There have been 19 road deaths arising out of 17 fatal incidents in Kerry so far this year. The number of fatalities was twice the number in many other counties, Chief Supt Hayes said. It was also over twice that of 2002, when there were eight deaths arising out of seven incidents.
With €400 million invested in the county's roads over the past 10 years, and €55 million this year alone, "roads have never been better in Kerry", senior executive engineer Frank Hartnett said at a road safety presentation to a meeting of the council's transport committee yesterday.
He objected to media reports that stated that "roads have claimed" lives. Kerry County Council had extensively investigated incidents along with the Garda and it had found that in only 3 per cent of cases the road was a contributory factory and that in these cases it was a secondary contributory factor, not the primary reason.
"Speed is the main one," Mr Hartnett said. There was no road pattern to the deaths and some of the fatalities this year had occurred on the newest national primary roads in the county.
Almost half (44 per cent) of those killed on the roads in the past five years were in the 17-25 age group, 11 of those who died this year were in that age group, and overall one person per month was dying on Kerry's roads.
The reduction in speed limits with the introduction of metric signs did not have any effect on driver behaviour, Mr Hartnett added. In one north Kerry village recently, the council had detected a speed of 155km/h (96mph) in a 50km zone late at night. The council was now looking at a pilot scheme of flashing display signs to warn drivers breaking the speed limit to slow down.
Transport committee chairwoman Cllr Anne McEllistrim (FF) said that drink-driving detections in Kerry had soared to over 600 people this year and that speed detections were down in the county from almost 7,000 in 2001 to 2,166 last year. Cllr McEllistrim called for extra resources for the Garda Traffic Corps. She also said communities often asked not to have potholes filled, as they believed that doing so could lead to increased speeds.
However, Cllr Ned O'Sullivan (FF) said the focus and resources should be spread more widely than random breath-testing and he called for more selective speed traps.
"There's a law-abiding community paying the price for an irresponsible group . . . our whole way of life is suffering," Mr O'Sullivan said.