It’s time to ditch the poor box ‘escape route’

WHAT, you would have to ask, is the rationale in imposing penalty points for driving offences if, as an alternative, the person found to be in breach of the law can simply donate some money to the poor box, with funds therein assigned to a particular charity – and walk out of court with a still-intact, clean licence?

This newspaper has found that some 242 motorists have avoided penalty points over the past two years because, instead of paying the appropriate penalty, they were simply allowed to contribute to charity.

Let’s make no mistake here – such poor box donations essentially permit the offending driver to escape conviction, and to avoid the penalty points that are appropriate to the specific crime committed in relation to the flaunting of the road traffic laws.

And this, it must be stressed, is despite a judicial ruling from the High Court in 2014, stating that the age-old poor box escape route was now barred.

So why, then, as we face into 2019, is this still the order of the day?

Earlier this year Shane Ross, Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, said that such an approach was sending entirely the wrong message to drivers – and he is absolutely right. For what kind of lesson is being learned by throwing a few euro into the poor box?

And, more importantly, if a driver who should be assigned penalty points, yet escapes them, can then run up, in other circumstances, more infringements than would have been permitted had he or she been punished in the first place, how many lives are being put at risk by having such a rogue driver still on the road when they should have been disqualified at this stage?

Poor box payments belong to another era and to a different Ireland. It is imperative that such an inadequate system of punishment is immediately consigned to where it belongs – in the past.