TD Micheal Healy Rae has the nation up in arms once again, after defending people who drink and drive.
Despite stricter measures surrounding drink driving correlating with significantly fewer road deaths, Healy Rae has insisted that it’s not “all about the drink.”
Speaking to Newstalk’s Richard Chambers, the Independent TD outlined the damaging effect the laws around drink driving have had on rural pubs.
He said:
“We’ve lost a lot of our rural pubs and what has happened is actually wrong,” he said. “These pubs were providing a great service. They were a place in the community where people could come together, play a game of cards, have a bit of enjoyment, and have a drink or two.
“When they really got strict on the drink driving laws there should have been a common sense approach in rural areas whereby people could go out, have a glass or two of beer, and go away home in rural areas.
“There was nothing wrong with it.”
When Chambers asked him if the drop in road deaths following the introduction of stricter laws had changed his opinion in any way, the answer was no.
“If a person goes out and has a little drink they’re hurting nobody. They weren’t killing people. There are a lot of reasons people are surviving accidents – our cars are improving all the time, thankfully modern technology ensure that people have a greater capacity to survive accidents.
“You can’t go saying that it’s all about drink.”
When asked his opinion on checkpoints, he agreed that they are “a great deterrent to thieves going around trying to break into houses.”
Sigh.
