Tá an Teachta Kelly ar dhuine de na cosantóirí is mó ar son na ngardaí sa Dáil. Tá muid go léir i bPáirtí an Lucht Oibre ag iarraidh feabhas a chur ar choinníollacha oibre na ngardaí agus cur ar a gcumas an pobal a choinneáil slán. I will focus my remarks on the area of roads policing. As the Minister knows, 190 lives were lost on Irish roads last year, the highest number in over a decade. Thirty-nine people have been killed on our roads so far this year, seven more this time last year. We are going backwards when it comes to road safety. Is it any wonder when the Government has failed to properly resource our primary enforcement mechanism of the rules of the road, namely, the Garda traffic corps? Bad driver behaviour will not change until the rules of the road are relentlessly enforced. It is like the wild west on our roads at times. There is speeding, red-light running, driver distraction from the massive iPad displays in cars or mobile phones, texting, watching Netflix on the M50 or recording Snapchats or voice notes while driving. I ask the Minister to look at the Bad Drivers Ireland account on TikTok, which will scare the bejesus out of him and give him a sense of the lunatics out there on our roads putting lives at risk with their recklessness. They will keep doing it unless they think there is some chance they will be caught. The Garda is essentially hamstrung on this. We have a road safety strategy, but we have seen next to no urgency in increasing the resources available to gardaí in terms of people power and the tools at their disposal such as traffic cameras. We have only nine static speed cameras in the country, three average-speed cameras and one red-light camera at Merrion Gates. In terms of numbers of traffic gardaí, before the recession we had a force of about 1,300 gardaí policing our roads, which was then absolutely decimated and cut in half to just 623 in 2018. There are now about 500,000 more cars on the roads than when the cuts were made. As noted in the motion, the then Garda Commissioner told the transport committee that over the course of 2024 and 2025, 150 new gardaí would be allocated to the roads policing division. What was actually delivered falls far short of this. At the end of 2023, there were 632 gardaí in the traffic corps and at the end of 2025 there were 647, a net increase of just 15. In other words, it was 10% of what was promised. We need to get a grip on this. We need urgent investment in the Garda roads policing division to bring the numbers up and enforce the rules of the road. We can talk all we like about road safety strategies, speed limits and penalty points, and they are of course necessary measures, but unless the rules of the road can be vigorously enforced, nothing will change. We will continue to see driver behaviour deteriorate and more and more people will be killed and seriously injured on our roads. We need to see greater investment in the Garda and investment into the traffic corps cannot be treated as an optional extra. It can quite literally be a matter of life and death. While we talk about high-visibility policing, it is great to see it. However, I cannot help noticing as I cycle into the Dáil every morning that I see lots of high-visibility gardaí in the Minister's constituency, but I get reports from my constituents and people all over Dublin that the same visibility is not elsewhere. While we support the measure, we would like to see it somewhere outside of Dublin Bay South as well.

Sentiment score: -0.07