I want to raise the issue of road safety. Again, we have seen a terrible weekend where a number of people have died on our roads. The numbers are increasing all of the time. In 2022, 155 people lost their lives on the road but so far this year, in the first ten months, we have exceeded that figure by ten and hundreds more have been seriously injured. We are talking about tragedies in communities all over the country.

The Minister is talking about increasing penalty points and looking at issues related to speeding but one thing that is consistent in all of this is the fact that we do not have an adequate number of gardaí policing our roads, monitoring and making sure people are safe. We have lost almost one third of our roads policing units in the last decade. The Government really needs to take responsibility here. We can change the laws as much as we like but if we do not have An Garda Síochána out there, implementing that law, and if we do not have adequate road safety measures in place to keep people safe on our roads, we are at nothing and more people are going to lose their lives. This is now a crisis and we need to address it.

We all appreciate that many different things need to be done in order to improve road safety and enforcement is one of those. I am told that in 2022, the last year for which we have figures, enforcement levels for life saver offences were 6% higher than they were in pre-Covid times. These offences are speeding, using mobile phones, not wearing seat belts and being intoxicated while driving. Garda authorities are saying that the number of enforcement incidences is actually higher but it is a fact that the number of people working on roads policing has gone down. This is something that I will be taking up with the Garda Commissioner when we meet, probably next week, in relation to road safety and other matters.