Culture
13 Apr 10

Getting The Points

Evidence has emerged that the beleaguered motorists of Kildare are substantially more likely to incur penalty points from Garda checkpoints than their counterparts in the rest of the land. Is this fair?

A Kildare county councillor has accused the Gardai of excessive enforcement of road traffic laws on a stretch of the N7.

According to Cllr Catherine Murphy (Independent), Kildare motorists have the highest proportion of penalty points in the country, despite the fact that the county has the second-lowest number of serious injuries nationally and is around average for fatalities. She says Kildare motorists to date have amassed in excess of 37,000 penalty points, most of them for speeding. “Is this about shooting fish in a barrel? Is it an income generator?” she asks. “I raised it with the Gardai and they were adamant that this was not the case but I’m not so sure.” (The figures were provided to her by the Department of Transport after she raised concerns about the matter at Kildare County Council.)
She cites the section of the N7 between the Red Cow Roundabout and the Kildare County Boundary, which alone accounted for 3,268 penalty points. Ironically, she says it is one of the safest stretches of road in the country.
“That area jumped out of the figures when I examined them,” she says. “It’s the widest and one of the safest roads in the country with a speed limit of 80kph in some stretches and 100kph in others even though it is of motorway standard. The wide open expanse of the road confuses people and they find themselves unwittingly breaking the speed limit. People who are given two penalty points are not going to court, in case they end up getting four.”
Figures provided to FG Deputy Fergus O’Dowd in 2009 showed that Kildare motorists had the highest percentage of penalty points. “There was no correlation between areas with high penalty points and serious injuries and fatalities,” Cllr Catherine Murphy says. “Donegal is an accident blackspot, but per head of population it has half the penalty points that Kildare has.”
However, Fine Gael’s spokesman on Transport, O’Dowd, suggested that it was probably down to the fact that Kildare happens to have more major motorways running through it than most other counties and that the Gardai would be more likely to mount more checkpoints for visibility reasons. “You could say it’s an occupational hazard for the people who happen to live in Kildare,” he says. “It’s somewhat the same in Meath, where there are also high volumes of traffic. And while it might seem unfair to the residents of those counties, I suppose if people weren’t breaking the speed limits they wouldn’t be getting penalty points in the first place.”