The new Road Safety Authority is to have an annual budget of some €30 million and a staff of over 300 public servants.
Broadcaster Gay Byrne, who has been appointed chairman, is the only member of the authority named so far.
Legislation for the establishment of the authority is now before the Oireachtas, and it will be a number of weeks before it is fully enacted.
When it becomes operational this year it will take over a range of functions currently under the control of the Department of the Environment, Department of Transport, the National Safety Council and the National Roads Authority. These include the driver-testing service and vehicle inspections such as the NCT.
It will have a formal statutory role in advising local authorities and the Government on road safety issues.
Mr Byrne said yesterday that he wanted to recruit a board for the authority that would be "enthusiastic and vigorous and will be extremely interested".
He stressed that it would not be a board of experts. "We don't want experts on the board because experts generally come to paddle their own canoe," he said on RTÉ radio's Pat Kenny Show.
He said young drivers would not listen to someone like him, and he agreed that they might pay more attention to cult personalities like Podge and Rodge.
"Who in their 20s or 30s is going to listen to Gay Byrne, or come to think of it, Gerry Ryan or Pat Kenny or Marian Finucane
Asked if someone like the racing driver Eddie Irvine would have more influence, he said: "I wonder would they listen to someone even younger than Eddie Irvine, and I need to think about that in terms of the board.
"Although we are not entirely devoted to the 20 to 30 age group, nevertheless they are a terribly terribly important part of what we would call our target market."
Mr Byrne said in most towns and villages there was a group of young men driving 10-year-old cars like "certifiable idiots".
"You see them approaching you on a long stretch of road and the car is hitting the road in spots and you realise if this guy loses it I am dead."
The road-safety situation was even worse in Donegal where he spent a lot of time. "In Donegal they all drive like certifiable lunatics, and the roads are extremely bad roads and they are driving them as if they were the M50."
He repeated that he would walk away from his new role if the Government did not give road safety the support it needed.
"All you can do is do the best you can, and if I've been set up or if I find out that there is absolute obduracy on the part of various people, then the only thing to do is walk away because I haven't all that much time to spare.
"I'm 72 this year. I don't know how much longer I have in this life, and I don't want to spend it twirling my thumbs and talking to Martin Cullen and civil servants and getting nowhere."
He dreaded "civil service ineptness and incompetence and dragging their feet", and he hoped he would not experience it.