70 ‘Drunk Driving’ Arrests in Clare this Year

Eleven people were arrested on suspicion of drunk-driving in County Clare over the June Bank Holiday weekend, bringing the total number of people to have been arrested on suspicion of drunk-driving in Clare since January to 70 people.
Speaking about the level of drunk-driving in the county, Clare’s Chief Superintendent, John Kerin said the 11 arrests over the June Bank Holiday weekend represent an increase of 17%, or 10 arrests, for the crime on last year.
“One might say 10 isn’t an awful lot but there are still 70 people now arrested in Clare in the first five months for drunken driving. It was 60 this time last year and 11 people driving over the legal limit in a week in a county like Clare is significant and it’s worrying,” he said.
He added that what made the figure all the more stark was that some of those people detected were caught at various times of the day.
“One person was caught at 11am, another at 3pm and another caught at 6.30pm. The others were at night-time. These weren’t people who were caught the morning after. The person at 11am was detected speeding and that’s how the gardaí’s attention was drawn to them,” he said.
The chief superintendent said, in light of these detections, he hoped the people of Clare weren’t “going back into their old ways of drunk-driving”.
“The message is that there are 11 people who will lose their licences as a result of ignoring the laws last week and the chances are, if people drive under the influence, they will be caught.
“They may get away with it on one or two occasions but there are a lot of checkpoints across the county. We had in excess of 700 checkpoints in Clare for the month of May. They aren’t all road traffic, they are also crime prevention checkpoints, but, again, people are stopped and they are being breathalised and are coming under the garda’s radar.
“People should be conscious that there are a lot of checkpoints and they will be stopped. If they are drunk-driving, they will be detected,” he said.
One of the things the Clare gardaí place strong emphasis on is traffic enforcement, according to the county’s garda chief.
He said that “while people might criticise that as being a money-making exercise for the Government”, the results can be seen for themselves.
“The results are shown in a very straightforward way, when one views the fact that road traffic fatalities are down 83% in Clare. To analyse the road statistics for the last four or five years, it is not just on a one-year basis; these results are consistent,” he said.
While drunk-driving, speeding, safety belts and mobile phones are all offences the gardaí constantly monitor in the county, Chief Superintendent Kerin said they actively monitor boy-racing activities in the county.
Of late, he said the gardaí have noticed a number of ‘donuts’ created by tyres in a number of locations around the county.
“We are monitoring them closely. We had a significant operation in place earlier in the year and I can assure both the young offending motorists and the public that this is something we have no problem mounting again in the near future,” he concluded.
Other road traffic statistics for this year’s June Bank Holiday weekend are for the most part down, with no fatal accidents, no serious injury accidents, and no non-serious injury accidents recorded over the long weekend.
The statistics remain the same in respect of fatal accidents, but serious injury accidents are down one, while non serious are down two on last year. Material damage-only accidents are up by one, with 15 recorded this year.

By Carol Byrne