3 April 2002: When the Gardai and the young people of this country both agree school children should be taught how to drive as part of the Leaving Certificate curriculum, then it is time the Government took heed.

This website has for a long time supported the campaign for a far more enlightened approach to ensuring our drivers of tomorrow are safer and sounder than the generations before them.

And if anyone feels insulted or downgraded by that assertion, may we refer you to the road carnage statistics for the past ten years.

Here’s what the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors want.

They say driving should be introduced for students from transition year upwards as part of a skills for life course.

Incidentally, they also want new measures to crack down on motorists driving under the influence of drugs.

The recommendations have been put forwards by the Association’s president Joe Dirwan.

Like so many others, he is deeply concerned at the continuing mayhem on our roads.

Mr Dirwan told the association's annual congress in Limerick that despite some progress in the past year the equivalent of the population of a small village was being killed on the roads with the death toll reaching 410 last year.

Schoolchildren, he said, should be taught the rules of the road, correct driving and road behaviour. They should also be taught that when they drove they were in charge of machines that were capable of killing and did kill.

The National Youth Federation backed the call. Its chief executive Tony Murphy accused politicians of being "indifferent" to the rising death toll.

Mr Murphy’s plan includes:
*second level schoolchildren receiving road safety and driving tuition
* primary school children (4-12) taking part in a road safety for pedestrians programme.
* transition year pupils taking part in a special driving skills programme and permitted to sit pre-driving test examinations
* employers encouraged to allow any employee under 18 years to take part in the safety programme.

Mr Murphy also suggested that drivers aged between 17 and 25 years with no accident claims or driving convictions against them should get a higher no claims bonus as an incentive to greater performance and road safety.

Meanwhile it was significant that Mr Dirwan should reject the proposal by Environment Minister Noel Dempsey to set up a separate road traffic corps if Fianna Fail are returned to government after the general election.

He said all road traffic law enforcement should be transferred from Environment to the Department of Justice.

He said this is not the time to fragment the Garda and set up a special police corps.

He claims a plethora of different forces dealing with different issues will lead to uncertainty and a diffusion of effort. He cited Britain as an example where the multiplicity of forces has created failures in communication and uncertain lines of command – his very own words.

He claimed it was "a bit rich" of Dempsey to propose a separate traffic corps when his Department was responsible for the delay in the introduction of the penalty points system and other road safety measures.

"We have been waiting for years for this system to reinforce the sanctions which are so badly needed to impose good road behaviour," he said.

He really hit the nail on the head when he said the department should introduce a licensing and registration system for driving schools.

As he so rightly pointed out, all that is needed at the moment is a car and a driving licence and, yet another driving school is born.

"There is no regulation or monitoring of standards and we have no way of knowing what kind of drivers the current schools are producing," he warned.

Many would also agree with his comments on speeding tickets and on-the-spot fines. He called for greater emphasis on the quality rather quantity of speed detections.

As we have said here so often, Mr Dirwan emphasises that road safety must not become a revenue generating cash cow for Government.
It would appear to be a big source of revenue. Last year 345,652 speeding tickets were issued. At 60 euros each that came to 20.7 million euros.

©2002irishcar.com