While the Road Safety Authority (RSA) is charged with promoting road safety, Cycling Ireland president, Ciaran Cannon, questions what authority it really has
The Road Safety Authority (RSA) has been criticised so often and so heavily in recent years it’s perhaps no exaggeration to say its reputation is toxic in some quarters.
It’s insistence on promoting hi-vis vests – for cyclists, pedestrians, and even school children for wearing in the middle of the day – has become tiresome, to say the least, especially as carnage continues on the roads.
Indeed, just months ago the Government seemed to be on cusp of splitting the authority into two separate entities until it performed a U-turn at the end of last year.
However, Cycling Ireland president Ciaran Cannon has offered his own view, saying the fundamental problem with the authority is that it has “no real authority”.
In other words, Cannon believes while much is expected of the authority, and its name suggests it has overarching responsibility for safety on the roads, its powers, if you could call them that, are limited.
“The RSA can research, educate, collect data, run public-awareness campaigns and advise government,” Cannon says in a column in the Irish Independent.
“But it cannot direct garda roads policing, compel a local authority to redesign dangerous infrastructure, require another state agency to implement a particular safety measure or insist the Government follows the recommendations of its own road-safety experts.
“That is the fundamental weakness at the heart of our current system. We have given one organisation a name that implies overarching responsibility for road safety, while leaving the actual powers needed to deliver safer roads dispersed across government departments, An Garda Síochána, local authorities and a range of other state agencies.”
The weekend before last, for example, five young men died in a wrong-way motorway joyriding incident on the M9 in Co Kildare. They drove head-on into an innocent family going to Dublin Airport, leaving the four of them with serious injuries.
According to reports, some members of Government were frustrated the RSA did not take a bigger role in the aftermath of that crash.
But Cannon says the RSA “simply does not have the authority” to make the kind of changes – or direct other agencies to make changes – that might prevent such incidents.
He points out in the Irish Independent that the RSA, under the legislation that provides for it, is responsible for things like “driver testing, licensing, vehicle standards, public education, research and the promotion of safer road use”.
But it does not have “the power to compel the rest of the State to act”. Cannon says it is time to vest some real authority in a national agency if we want to improve road safety.