Sir, – Your report on the behaviour of banned drivers (“Almost 90 per cent of banned drivers failing to surrender licences”, News, March 14th) makes for both alarming and depressingly predictable reading. From the point of view of the majority of law-abiding drivers out there, it’s clearly unfair that people are prepared to (and permitted to) “game” the system, seemingly with impunity.
But far more important than fairness to other drivers is the implication that people clearly identified as being unfit to drive by the law are nevertheless continuing to operate vehicles in public space that they share with other motorists, cyclists and pedestrians. Recent data shows that, despite initiatives like “Vision Zero” and “Slow Down Day”, deaths to pedestrians and cyclists are not coming down. Obviously we should always be very careful when attributing blame for these tragedies to single causes, but it’s surely not hard to imagine that a system that’s so broken that it is incapable of requiring this basic level of compliance is also not capable of achieving the kinds of road safety outcomes that we all want. – Yours, etc,
DAVE MATHIESON,
Salthill,
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Galway.