People will continue to drink and drive because they know the Garda only clamp down on the practice at Christmas, the Irish Insurance Federation (IIF) said yesterday.
Mr Niall Doyle, corporate affairs manager, said the increased arrests for drink-driving this Christmas did not mean the problem was getting worse. "In fact I suspect quite the opposite is true. As Garda patrols have never been out in such force before, of course you are catching more drink drivers. The statistics just mean you are doing the job now that should have been done for the last number of years."
He was speaking after An Garda said its members had arrested 567 people for suspected drink-driving in the first two weeks of its campaign. This was a 3 per cent increase on 2003. Of the 765 people breath-tested, more than 70 per cent were arrested.
Mr Doyle said there were 12,000 gardaí, 12,000 pubs and slightly over 12,000 arrests for drink-driving a year. "That's one arrest per garda per annum. Intoxicating statistics aren't they?" he said.
Arrests must go up and the visibility of the gardaí must increase before motorists believe the chance of being caught is high enough for them to leave the car at home. "When this thought process gets embedded into the Irish psyche, we will then see a fall off in fatalities, serious injuries and drink-driving arrests." This level of enforcement must be kept constant year round. Drivers behaved themselves impeccably for the first four months after penalty points were introduced but they reverted to their bad habits when they realised there was nobody to catch them speeding, he said.
The IIF also called for the urgent introduction of random breath-testing.
