THE ROAD Safety Authority (RSA) has resisted calls for making rear-facing seats mandatory for children up to the age of four, saying parents need to pay attention to existing safety rules first.
The call was made by the European Transport Safety Council this week as it published a report on deaths among children in road crashes. The ETSC said 18,500 children under the age of 14 had died on European roads over the last 10 years, 1,200 in 2007 alone.
The ETSC report, published on Monday, showed Portugal had achieved the best annual average reduction in road deaths among children, with an average annual decrease of 15 per cent between the start of 1998 and the end of 2007.
Ireland, along with France, Slovenia, Switzerland and Belgium, also ranked highly, with reductions close to 10 per cent per annum on average over the 10-year period.
Under existing EU law, children under three years of age cannot travel in a car unless they are restrained in the correct child seat. Children over that age, who are under 150cm in height and weigh less than 36kg must use the correct seat, booster seat or cushion. Sweden, which has made rear-facing seats mandatory for children under four years of age, has the lowest child mortality rate from road collisions between 2005 and 2007.
However, Brian Farrell of the Road Safety Authority said the main concern in Ireland was the number of parents not strapping their children into cars and the large number who use safety seats incorrectly. “What we suggest is that you should be rearward facing up until at least a year,” says Farrell. “The child’s neck hasn’t developed enough to avoid a whiplash situation and that’s why you have children facing rearward.
“The next message I’d be giving out is that you invest in a child car seat that has good side wings to protect the head in case of a side impact, because that is the greatest risk a child faces if they are involved in a crash on the roads in a car.
Farrell also said Isofix fittings for child car seats were the safest option. These allow seats to be attached to hooks that are directly connected to the car’s chassis. Most cars built after 2002 are fitted with Isofix connections.
“We have an 80 per cent misuse rate on child car seats in this country, with 60 per serious installation errors. So they’ll provide little or no protection in the event of a crash.”
He said the ETSC suggestion was “not necessarily over the top but we have some really key things to get right first.
“If we could get parents keeping their children rearward facing until they’re at least one year of age we’d be doing well. If they were belting them in properly and using the right car seats . . . we would be doing really, really well. So I think we have some basic things to get right first before I think we can start talking about this.”
Farrell points out that seven children under the age of 10 died on Irish roads last year, compared to six in 2007.
