Tougher penalties for ‘aggravated’ and ‘wrong-way’ dangerous driving are proposed

“Aggravated” dangerous driving, including deliberately driving the wrong way down a motorway, will result in harsher penalties under legislation that the Government plans to have enacted before the end of this year.Minister of State at the Department of Transport Seán Canney said officials would next week start work on stricter laws for those who “deliberately put other people’s lives at risk”. It follows the fatal M9 crash this month. It is understood the Department of Justice has proposed a new offence of intentionally driving the wrong way on a dual carriageway or motorway under the existing Roads Act. The existing law that criminalises dangerous driving will now include “wrong-way driving” on specific public roads.Canney has also criticised social network TikTok for failing to remove videos of illegal and dangerous driving from its platform and he accused it of prioritising making money over its “moral obligation” to the people of Ireland. READ MOREHe was speaking on Friday after meeting senior leaders of the Road Safety Authority (RSA), An Garda Síochána and Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) following the M9 crash. Five teenagers died when the BMW they were travelling in was driven the wrong way on the M9 near Moone, Co Kildare, and hit another vehicle early on August 16th. A child and three women from the same family, who were travelling to Dublin Airport in the other car, were seriously injured in the same incident. They were on the correct side of the motorway.Officials from the Department of Transport and the Department of Justice also attended the meeting in Leinster House. The same group is scheduled to meet again in four weeks. Next week An Garda Síochána will meet the departments of Justice and Transport again. Canney said his department would be discussing the proposed laws for “aggravated” driving with the Department of Justice and the Attorney General’s office as soon as next week, with a plan to have legislation enacted by the end of the year. He said that while there was already existing dangerous driving legislation, the “penalty might not be enough”. Canney said new penalties had yet to be decided by the Government, but he wanted to see longer jail sentences for such offenders and a new social attitude towards such driving that made it “intolerable” to accept.“I think we need to make sure that when somebody does something this blatantly wrong and actually is imposing danger on other people that there are consequences for them,” he said. He said the Government was also considering proposals from the Department of Justice on how the State can better protect gardaí who pursue vehicles which drive the wrong way down a motorway. One garda has already faced prosecution for a 2021 incident when he pursued a vehicle that was driving the wrong way down the N7.TII will also be sharing details with the Government of “pilot schemes” that they have been running on new technologies that could be used to limit dangerous driving. The meeting considered what technology could be used to impede cars driving the wrong way down a motorway. Canney said that some technology can “create problems inadvertently”, but said “there is an opportunity with AI [artificial intelligence] and the camera technology which we have at the moment.” “And what we need to do is to continue, maybe with AI technology to help us detect quicker what’s going on, maybe to have alerts quicker,” he said. Some of the five teenagers killed in the M9 crash had previously shared videos on TikTok of themselves engaged in dangerous driving.TikTok had said it was “closely monitoring content related to this incident” and would remove videos and accounts that broke its rules. Canney appealed directly to the social media giant to make sure it was not “condoning” illegal activity.He questioned any company that was more interested in “the fact that they want to make money, as opposed to make money and at the same time have a moral obligation to the people in the country and across the world”.Canney also defended the performance of the RSA, saying he had confidence in the state agency. “The people I deal with, the directors, I have very full confidence in them and what they’re doing,” he said.