Road safety laws ‘undermined’ by inconsistent outcomes

Public confidence in road safety laws is being undermined by inconsistent outcomes in Ireland’s courts, a leading road safety advocate has warned.

Conor Faughnan, director of consumer affairs at the AA, has likened the courts to a “roulette wheel” in which “the mood of the judge on the day has a big effect”, the Irish Examiner reports.

He made the remarks in an interview with Live 95 FM where he suggested there was a public perception that road traffic offences were easy to overturn in a courtroom.

Mr Faughnan told his interviewer: “It undermines general confidence in road safety and road safety law. It also encourages more people, egged on in turn by their solicitors, to give it a go in court.

“The effect of that is that it clogs up the courts and is wasteful of everybody’s time and energy.

“We want road safety convictions to stick. We don’t necessarily want to hand out penalty points willy-nilly, but we do want to believe that if you are guilty of a road traffic offence, you have to take the punishment on the chin.”

He also said it was “a miscarriage of justice if somebody is absolutely, bang to rights, unambiguously guilty of an offence, but for one reason or other it just gets thrown out of court, or struck out, and every time that happens it’s a minor defeat for everything we want to achieve in road safety”.