Fake breath tests ‘may have led to deaths’
GARDAÍ recording bogus breath tests may have led to more road deaths, road safety chiefs have claimed.
The Road Safety Authority has said that the massive exaggeration of breath tests and comparatively low number of drinkdrivers being caught may have influenced resources being moved out of roads policing.
It is concerned this could have negatively impacted on the numbers of people killed and seriously injured. ‘This is the most important fact that must not be lost in the analysis,’ the agency said.
And last night one heartbroken mother, who lost her teenage son in a road traffic collision, said ‘lives have been lost’ and ‘many more destroyed’ by falsification of breath tests.
The latest review of the scandal warned this week that the true scale of the falsification of drinkdriving checks may never be known – but that close to two million records were made up.
The RSA said that in the years when the gardaí were supposedly running high levels of road safety enforcement, it had no reason to doubt the numbers.
A spokesman added: ‘We believe that if the level of activity that the gardaí were claiming to be doing had been done that it could have saved more lives, prevented more deaths and injuries on the roads.’
Meanwhile, Donna Price, whose 18-year-old son Darren died in a car crash in 2006, called for somebody to be held accountable for the Garda breath-test scandal. She went on to found the Irish Road Victims’ Association.
Reacting to the report into the breath-test scandal, she said: ‘We are absolutely shocked. It just seems to get worse and worse as each report comes out.
‘We started out with one million fake breath tests and now we are up to almost two million. Had those tests been carried out, maybe an awful lot of lives could have been. And an awful lot of our families could have been saved the utter devastation that such a loss causes.’
Ms Price said that ‘we rely on the gardaí to enforce the road traffic legislation’. ‘If they’re not doing it – if they are just pretending to do it – then where do we go? It’s just appalling’ she added.
The RSA said it was disappointed that many gardaí showed a lack of understanding of the link between effective random breath-testing and improvements in road safety.
The agency said this impacted on resources for the Garda Traffic Corps over recent years.
The RSA said it had harboured concerns about the level of enforcement as road deaths increased in 2013 and 2014 and again in 2016 after years of reductions.