Road Safety: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-17 ============================================================ Paraic Brady (FG), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I agree with the sentiments of everybody who has spoken tonight. The last time we spoke about this, we spoke about tractor users and a provisional licence being given to somebody at 18 or even younger. When contractors come and a workforce is needed at silage or slurry time, they are allowed to drive up to 250 HP tractors and in some cases even more. With weight-bearing trailers, the slurry tank or trailer will be eight to 12 tonnes and the load behind that will be another ten to 12 tonnes. Between the width of the tractor, trailer and the load behind it, there is 30 tonnes to 35 tonnes coming down the road in some cases. They are provisional licence holders. I am not blaming them for causing all the accidents. There has to be a training school where young people are assessed to see if there are capable of training to drive that tractor and the speed it does. There should be a mechanism, like in building sites, for a school whereby they are put up on a tractor or trailer, drive through and reverse around a set of cones and back into an area using their mirrors. If that is passable, they will receive a licence. Everybody should be assessed on their ability to drive a tractor. I am sure the manufacturers - Massey, John Deere, New Holland - will buy into this because it is in their vested interest that people are capable of driving these high-powered tractors. The evaluation should be left up to the instructor's know-how, and if they feel a person is fit to do this, they should receive their licence, and if not, they should continue their training. That is fair to everybody who is a road user. I welcome active travel. My village of Drumlish in County Longford has seen huge investment in active travel. I never realised, even though I was a councillor, that we had James Cawley Jnr, an activist for people in wheelchairs. I have lived in the village all my life and took it for granted that James Cawley Jnr. could go to the shop, come out of his house and go wherever he wanted. I took it for granted and so did everybody else who was local. Unfortunately, James said to me that for him to go to the local shop, he had to go out on the road at a break where people drive up their cars, drive up the road in his wheelchair and then go in at somebody else's gateway. He could not actually the use the footpaths because they narrowed in some spots and in other areas where he wanted to cross there was no low-level pedestrian crossing. From him coming to us as local councillors and us going to engineers, we have made a village that has seen huge progress in low-level access. I would like to see something like that rolled out in planning for active travel throughout the whole of Ireland. We need to think of wheelchair users in infrastructure. It is something we have missed over the past number of years. I thank James for advocating for people who use wheelchairs. He has highlighted it in Longford and throughout other counties. We have come on leaps and bounds. I know first hand that we have seen huge change. Concerning safety, we have to look at schools because of the volume of kids there at all times. Around the school in Drumlish only three weeks ago, a raised pedestrian crossing was fitted which acts as a crossing for kids coming and going from school from one side of the road to the other. It is raised so it slows down people using the road because they see it as a ramp. Driver behaviour will always be driver behaviour but this infrastructure has slowed down traffic around one school in the area. In a village out the road, Ballinamuck, a pathway has been provided that is 5 km long. When it comes to the national school, everybody has to cross the main road at their own peril. The road is 7 m or 8 m wide. Everybody who uses that pathway has to walk, look left and look right and take a chance. It is imperative that safety is a must around every school. We must look at raised pedestrian crossings and safety measures around every school. If we are serious about the safety of our kids and educating them well, that is where we start. We have been talking about all the technology we have in Ireland. I mentioned previously putting phone blockers in tractors so that anybody using a tractor is stopped from using a mobile phone. With technology now and car manufacturers, there is no reason there cannot be a phone blocker in every car manufactured from now on and it either comes through on the radio or another system. If we are looking at technology, it is something that should be discussed. It would be one way to alleviate phone use in cars because it has to come through on the radio. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-17