Garda Commissioner Drew Harris issued a directive to all uniformed Garda personnel to spend 30 minutes of each shift engaged in high visibility roads policing.
The RSA has faced some criticism recently but Ms O’Donnell said it was fit for purpose although it needed more funding from the Department of Transport. It had not been able to “afford to do all of the actions and all of the major campaigns that are needed given the increase in fatalities”. She added “speed is always there” as a factor in many fatal crashes and she believed there had been “an increase in speeding right around the country”. She also cited the “four killer behaviours” of speeding, drink driving, not wearing a seat belt and mobile phone use.
Some 88,734 drink-driver breath tests were carried out to the end of last August, about half pre-pandemic detections recorded in 2018 and 2019. The number of arrests for drink-driving to last August was 3,071, down about one-quarter on the years between 2014 and 2018.