What will it take for the message to get through?

Editorial Column

If road deaths continue at the rate seen so far in 2024 - one a day over the first eight days - the country could be looking at a catastrophic death toll of 366 people by the end of this Leap year.

Surely that is wake-up call enough for motorists, road users, the Gardaí, local authorities, the Road Safety Authority and others.

Cavan, sadly, was among the counties left bereft in the first week of January following the death of motorcyclist Gary Murphy after an accident at Corlurgan on the outskirts of Cavan Town last Tuesday afternoon. He was a father of four.

Gary, like the eight others killed so far this year and the 184 people who lost their lives on Irish roads in 2023, was somebody’s son, somebody’s parent, somebody’s sibling, somebody’s best friend. These are people - not statistics or pie charts - real people whose deaths leave a great void forever in the lives of their loved ones and their communities.

Gary was described as the “gentlest of men” who loved his children more than “anything in this world”. His broken-hearted daughter described him as “a kind man with a huge heart” who would do “absolutely anything for anybody at a moment’s notice”.

It’s tragic. 2023 was the worst year in a decade on Irish roads as far as fatalities and serious accidents are concerned. Of the 184 people killed, 69 were drivers, 44 were pedestrians, 34 were passengers, 26 were motorcyclists, eight were cyclists and three were e-scooter users. Seventy-eight percent were men.

Locally six people lost their lives in fatal road traffic accidents in County Cavan in 2023 - a record not surpassed since the bleakest of years in 2012 when 10 people were killed in road accidents in the Breffni County.

It begs the question - are enough resources being assigned to garda management in Cavan and Monaghan to police our roads at a time when our population is increasing, as are the number of cars and road users?

Shockingly, the figures show that there has been a 58% drop in the number of Garda members assigned to the Roads Policing Unit since 2009. The manpower stood at 38 gardaí in 2009 and just 16 in 2023.

The festive period is a time, traditionally, when gardaí embark on a major road safety campaign and ramp up visibility and the number of checkpoints on our roads. Yet, a question asked of 10 people, all drivers, in The Anglo-Celt office yesterday morning returned a worrying answer.

Did you encounter any checkpoints on the roads over the festive period? No was the answer from a group of people who come from all around the county (and indeed the country) and who were busy and out and about over the Christmas holidays at various times of the day and night.

Of course, this newspaper is not suggesting there were no checkpoints but visibility certainly could have been better. It was noted by some that they came across plenty of speed vans, however, and they saw plenty of gardaí patrolling the streets at night time and on weekends.

Garda management can only assign the resources (members) available to them as best they can taking into account multiple factors such as geographical spread and policing demands/concerns at a particular time. That has become increasingly difficult in an expanded district that now puts Cavan and Monaghan in with Louth.

There are plans to reduce speed limits on our roads across the board in an effort to tackle the carnage but, if we don’t have the manpower on the ground to enforce the limits and laws that are already in place, it seems like a futile exercise.

The solutions to these problems are obvious and yet they have proven impossible to implement over decades.

We need more gardaí assigned to Roads Policing units nationwide and greater investment in maintaining and improving our road network paying particular attention to safety solutions at blackspots. Ultimately, people and road users need to be personally accountable for their behaviour on the roads - follow the rules of the road, the laws of the land and take care.

Your life - or the life of a loved one - is in your hands.

Here’s to a safer new and hopefully less tragic year on our roads.