Ireland’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee is to travel to Scotland to find out more about how average speed cameras have been used to make roads safer in the country.

Talking to journalists at Ireland’s National Ploughing Championships, Ms McEntee called the summer “really awful” when it comes to road deaths.  “We need to do everything that we can to reverse that trend and it’s looking at the key factors that result in many of these incidents and crashes and unfortunately deaths  on our roads and speeding is the top one,” she said. “We’ve doubled the number of go safe vans that we have across the country, but I do think we need to look more at average speed cameras.”

She talked about how Scotland, which uses Jenoptik technology on roads across the country, has a similar population and road profile, and “they use average speed cameras much more. They have less of a road policing unit – they use technology in a different way and I think it’s something that we need to look at.”

Ms McEntee then explained how the two countries would be sharing ideas. “We are actually going to be meeting with a team from Scotland in the next month to just see how that might work,” she added. “We have speed cameras [in Ireland] and compliance is about 98%. So if you were to apply that to 30 stretches of roads where we know are dangerous for the black spots, I really think it would make a difference.”

(File picture of average speed camera, courtesy Jenoptik)