Mia Lily Keogh O'Keeffe was a 16-year-old girl. She was struck by a red Mercedes when she was walking her dog across a pedestrian crossing in Navan this February. The driver fled the scene and it was a horrific accident. Seven other people were killed that same weekend. Mia Lily was a wonderful, well-liked young girl and she had her whole life in front of her. Her life has been stolen from her. The family is suffering profound grief. The mother has said she will never be whole again. This was no accident. The reality is that this was a killing that was caused as a result of a number of different factors. For sure there was the driver involved but the road itself is not up to scratch in terms of protections. This is a really important point that the Minister of State and the Government are missing. Most road safety projects protect people from normal driving behaviour. They do not protect people from abnormal or dangerous driving behaviour. If the Minister of State goes to most countries on the Continent, in small towns and villages every single entry point will have some kind of road traffic measure. It will have a chicane, it will have ramps or it will have some staggered-type lanes which will slow traffic right down. In both cases of normal behaviour and dangerous driving behaviour, people are protected. That is not happening in Ireland and, truth be told, until that happens a lot of the talk that happens in here will be hot air because we are still going to see people being killed on a regular basis. There are many parts of my county where the junctions, roads and bridges are simply not safe to drive through. They are not safe to drive through and they are being allowed to exist in that state by councils and the Government. Until the Government means business in fixing those junctions, narrow roads or bridges we are going to see more deaths happening in the future. The last point here is that we can have all the rules we want in terms of road safety but if we do not have the gardaí to implement them we are on a hiding to nothing. In 2009, there were well over 1,000 road traffic gardaí in this country. Now, there are just over 600. That is a measure of how seriously this Government takes it. The Government needs to increase those numbers if it wants to protect life.

Sentiment score: -0.18