PROMOTING ROAD SAFETY Road Safety remains a crucial message as fatality and crash figures rise again.
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rish Road Safety Week 2019 took place from Monday, 7 October to Sunday, 13 October, with the campaign including a range of awareness-raising events and activities across the country. The campaign was once again jointly run by the Road Safety Authority (RSA), the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) and An Garda Síochána, with contributions from other organisations such as the Irish Tyre Industry Association (ITIA). As well as a nationwide media campaign, the National Road Safety Education Service travelled the length and breadth of the country, delivering
road safety education programmes to crèches, schools, universities, workplaces and communities, while other events also took place across the week. While 2018 saw road fatalities decrease to the lowest on record, the provisional figures for 2019 suggest that, with 124 deaths by 5 November, compared with a year total of 136 fatal collisions resulting in 142 fatalities in 2018, those numbers were on the rise again.
THE CAMPAIGN The campaign kicked off on Monday, 7 October, with the Annual Academic Lecture in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the theme being Drug Impaired Driving: prevalence, risks and detection. This year’s event heard from international and national experts
Sue O’Neill, CEO, ITIA, with Garda Superintendent Eddie Golden and Moyagh Murdoch, CEO RSA.
ROAD SAFETY
on drug driving, including Professor Denis A. Cusack, Director, Medical Bureau of Road Safety, who discussed drug impaired driving in Ireland; Dr Vigdis Vindenes, Head of Research, Dep. of Forensic Sciences, Oslo University Hospital who presented on impairment based legislative limits which have been imposed in Norway; and Assistant Commissioner, David Sheahan of An Garda Síochána, who discussed enforcement of drug driving in Ireland. Figures unveiled at the lecture show that drug driving is a major problem on Ireland’s roads, with 68% of drivers with a positive roadside drug test between April 2017 and July 2019 showing a positive test for cannabis. Some 37% of roadside tests revealed a positive test for cocaine. The Medical Bureau of
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