A call has been made to establish a designated road safety officer for County Waterford.
Cllr. John Pratt made the call this week in light of the rising number of road deaths nationwide.
Gardaí will now complete a mandatory half hour of roads safety policing per shift under new measures.
Cllr. Pratt told WLR News that every agency involved must play their part in making our roads safer.
"I think it's paramount that we do what we can to highlight the issues. Like already we're only months into the year, and the death rates are already after increasing beyond where they have been at this time stage last year. I believe anything that we can do, it's in our gift to create this full-time position, I believe we should be taking it on and should be doing it."
Cllr. Pratt says consistent bad weather has definitely played its' part in the rising number of tragedies.
"We never ever saw as much rainfall as well on main roads which caused their own problems, but also in towns and villages, in the central towns and villages. You have your rural roads that have been completely crumbling, but you also have your roads that wouldn't in the past have been as devastated as they are, or your potholes coming in places that in the past we were getting away with it. So the reality is the issue there also is that we need more funding."
He believes dwindling Garda numbers have also made our roads more dangerous.
"If we're breaking the limit, we deserve to get caught, and the message has to be sent out there. Unless we recruit more Gardaí, unfortunately that's not going to happen overnight either, (because the Gardaí numbers are falling, there's no doubt they're falling, and it's gone to the stage now, unfortunately, that we seem to be in a situation where even to recruit Gardaí, a job that would have been considered a job that people would have loved to have taken up in the past - the interest doesn't seem to be there."
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