OPINION: Boogiemen, ‘little Hitlers’ and our roads

With the death toll on Mayo’s roads in 2024 far surpassed the number in counties with much larger populations, councillors should stop using the Government ‘up in Dublin’ as a boogieman and focus on making roads safer.
The planned changes include making the default limit for rural local roads 60km/h rather than the current 80km/h. It also includes having the default on national secondary roads as 80km/h rather than 100km/h and the default for built-up areas 30km/h rather than 50km/h.
Setting the default limit doesn’t mean all roads must be the same speed limit.
Cllr Michael Loftus claimed at a recent council meeting that councillors opposed to reducing default speed limits on rural local roads also care about road safety. But arguments being used against the speed limit proposals are toxic to the idea of road safety.
“If the speed limit is reduced to 60 km per hour, it will make people impatient while they are driving. If you come up behind someone and there is a string of four or five cars, what are you going to do? You are going to try and pass some of them and that will cause more problems,” said Cllr Loftus.
We’re talking about local roads here. Not national or regional routes. The vast majority of local roads in Mayo and across Ireland are not fit for the current 80km/h limit.
More importantly, these local roads are the types of roads where motorists will regularly get stuck behind a tractor, a nervous driver or somebody walking or cycling.
The impatient drivers who cannot control themselves, the drivers who Cllr Loftus theorises about, will be dangerous on our roads regardless of the speed limit. Councillors should be condemning such drivers, not using them as an example to oppose a road safety measure.
Some critics of the outgoing Government’s speed limit changes have called them ‘blanket’ speed limits, but that’s closer to what we currently have. The changes are not perfect, but they make far more sense than the current system and are in line with what safety experts and campaigners have called for decades.
Until now, the vast majority of rural roads – with the exception mainly of national roads – had a blanket speed limit of 80km/h. That includes boreens with grass down the middle and many other roads which aren’t quite boreens but also are not suitable for 80km/h.
Cllr Loftus is not the only councillor who is rallying against the changes, but he is the most vocal and sensationalist, with reports outlining that he said officials in the Department of Transport are ‘little Hitlers’ who are ‘dictating’ to councillors ‘and putting a gun to our heads’.
This completely misrepresents the situation.
While the national Government sets default limits for roads, councils are responsible for setting them in their areas. It’s one of the few areas councillors have the final say on.
When contacted last week to check if this has changed, the Department of Transport confirmed: “Recent legislation has not changed this structure, or affected the capacity of Local Authorities to vary special speed limits.”
In other words, if councillors wanted, for example, to keep the Crossmolina to Killala road, which is a local road, at 80km/h, the Department of Transport would not intervene.
This is where things get more complicated. Mayo County Council must justify deviations from guidelines. Working with officials and other councillors on that would be a better use of time than comparing civil servants aiming for safety road to a genocidal maniac.
As with any road safety measure, the changes won’t be a silver bullet. But opposing safety measures sends out a poor message.

Cian Ginty is editor of IrishCycle.com and lives in Ballina.