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A lot done, more to do E-mail
Written by Michael Carr   
Thursday, 11 October 2007
The devastation visited on families across the country this Monday, once again brought home the terrible and often avoidable tragedy of deaths on our roads.

Sometime it’s hard to know why it happens, sometimes the answer is more obvious but the fact is it still happens far too often. A report from the European Transport Safety Council also this week shows that Ireland has improved its road safety standing in Europe by climbing four places in 2006 to become the 12th lowest country for road deaths of the 29 EU countries surveyed. The report also shows that road deaths in Ireland have dropped by 11 per cent since 2001.

That said, the report shows Ireland making much slower progress than some other countries like France and Portugal and still well off the EU target of reducing road deaths by half in the ten years prior to 2010.

The report also found that a slight improvement in the fatality figures for 2006 was too small to have been anything other than chance, as opposed to a result of road policies.
One thing that jumps out from the report is that the country that improved the most was Portugal, and the reason for this was the vast amounts of traffic taken off poor quality roads thanks to a massive motorway-building programme.

This is the one area where government can have a very real impact. Today, in the Ireland of 2007 incredibly a motorway from Cork to Dublin is still two years away. The Mitchelstown Relief Road where one of this week’s fatal accidents occurred although a new road, will not eventually be part of the main Cork to Dublin route.

In 2010 the final part of the Cork to Dublin motorway which will fully bypass Mitchelstown is due to open. If it were open today, at least one of this weeks fatal accidents probably wouldn’t have happened. There was also a further fatal accident at Newlands Cross near Dublin this week, a very busy junction that will be familiar to many Cork motorists who have driven to Dublin.

Newlands Cross is also on the Cork to Dublin route and it too is due to for replacement, this time by a grade-separated junction. No date has been set for this work to even start, at what is one of the busiest traffic junctions in the country.

 


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