Speeding offences spiral in Tipperary in 2020

Serious concern has been expressed by the chief garda officer in Tipperary over an 80 per cent increase in excessive speeding detections recorded in the county in the first 10 months of the current year.

Chief Superintendent Derek Smart said the number of cases had jumped to 3,326 compared to 1,872 for the same period in 2019.

Speaking at a recent meeting of the county's Joint Policing Committee held on Zoom, he said the 80 per cent increase in detections was recorded by the force's own road policing and regular working units and did not even include detections by the speeding vans operated on behalf of the State by the private company Go-Safe.

What was even more stark was that the sprialling detections were record during a year when people's movements had been restricted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It just shows you that people are willing to take a chance. It's something we are going to have to try to keep enforcing, to keep our accident rates down,” said Chief Superintendent Smart.

USING MOBILE PHONESWHILE DRIVING

He said by far the largest cohort of offenders involved in speeding and using mobile phones while driving and not wearing seat belts were males in the 21 to 45 year-old category. They accounted for as much as three times the rate recorded by female drivers in the same age cohort.

Sinn Féin TD Martin Browne said the increase in speeding detections in the county had now gone to a “crazy” level, while Fine Gael's Cllr Mark Fitzgerald noted that speeding had become a massive issue in towns and villages. He felt “joined-up thinking” by gardaí and the county council was needed to tackle the problem.

Cllr Ger Darcy (FG) said detections were very high. “We don't need to come into a JPC meeting to know that; we are hearing it all the time. We get complaints from people from all over the area, on main roads, on small winding roads, in villages and in towns.”

He said the problem of excessive speeding was regularly debated by Nenagh district councillors at their meetings. “We have excessive speeding all over the place. There isn't a day goes by that someone makes a complaint to me about speeding.”

The council and gardaí would have to address the problem; more speed checks were needed and possibly ramps put on certain roads to slow down drivers.

Chief Superintendent Smart said the high increase in detections reflected the fact that members of An Garda Síochána were very proactive in trying to tackle the problem. Gardaí were not operating checkpoints to catch people out; they were just trying to save people's lives. “But unfortunately it's not until people change their behaviour that this figure will not start coming down.”

SPEED RAMPS

Deputy Browne said calls by politicians for speed ramps to deployed to reduce speed in places like housing estates had been resisted by the county council who had argued that they would impede emergency services responding to callouts in such locations.

Chief Superintendent Smart said that there were a number of speed ramps in place in the area where he lived. “I have no difficulty with speed ramps at all, and certainly in housing estates I think it is vital to have them there. They do slow down traffic and they do keep it to a pace where children when they run out on a road have some chance.”

He told Deputy Browne that he would have no difficulty in attending a council meeting to outline his views on speed ramps.

Dealing with collisions in the county, he said fatal crashes had decreased by 46 per cent so far this year compared to the same period in 2019, down from 13 deaths to seven.

“Unfortunately any one of these deaths is one too many and we will continue to focus on this area going forward into 2021.”

He said serious injury collisions in Tipperary are up by 9 per cent this year, from 23 to 25.

In the year to date gardaí had conducted a total of 1,404 checkpoints. This figure was down 67 per cent on 2019, reflecting a very different year due to the pandemic and restrictions on people's movements.

A total of 320 people were detected driving under the influence of an intoxicant, down 3 per cent on last year. But the figure now included statistics for drug driving for which there had been 78 detections.

The number of people detected using their mobile phones while driving was up 11 per cent, an increase from 660 last year to 724 in the current year.

The Chief Superintendent said the figure that always surprised him was the numbers not wearing seat belts - cases so far this year in Tipperary were up 20 per cent, from 214 to 256.

ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR M7

Meanwhile, he revealed that he was hoping an initiative to reduce speed on the M7 between Nenagh and Limerick would be rolled out early next year. An electronic system will be deployed at Birdhill to measure speed of drivers. The stretch of motorway had been chosen because of the number of accidents that took place in the area, particularly during times of bad weather. The initiative would be advertised.

“It won't be covert; it will be very much overt and people will see it and be warned about it as they come into that area that their speed is being captured,” he said, adding that the aim was to get people to slow down for their own life's sake. It would be the first project of its kind outside Dublin.