Commissioner gets a grilling from clued-in kids!
Geraldine Grennan
As if he wasn't already under enough pressure with the fallout from the Maurice McCabe revelations, new Garda Commissioner Drew Harris had to field a few tricky questions from some very savvy primary school children in Kilbeggan on Wednesday at the launch of the 'Be Safe, Be Seen' campaign across the four Midland counties.
Scoil on Chlochair in Kilbeggan was the venue for the launch which will see over 40,000 children across the Midlands receive high-vis jackets and stickers over the next four weeks as the dark winter evenings approach. The collaborative initiative is also being supported by Midlands 103, Tullamore Credit Union and Tullamore Rotary Club, and is being led by the trauma and orthopaedic surgeons from the Midlands Regional Hospital in Tullamore. Also in attendance at the launch was Gillian Treacy, road safety advocate and board member of the Road Safety Authority, who tragically lose her four-year old son, Ciaran in a road accident in Laois in 2014.
During a light-hearted question and answer session with Commissioner Harris in the Kilbeggan school's assembly hall, one child asked what it was like having to report to the Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan, while another wanted to know what it was like being in charge of 12,000 guards!
Amid peals of laughter, the Commissioner said it was very important that there be accountability in every area of life, and he was accountable to the Minister and had “no problem atall” with that, while he told another child that it was “not as hard as one might think” to be able to manage all the Gardai.
The Commissioner had earlier spent over an hour posing for numerous photographs with children amid the very impressive display of emergency vehicles – including the Air Ambulance – in the grounds of Scoil an Chlochair, and also on hand with their vehicles were members of the national ambulance service and the fire service.
The 'Be Safe, Be Seen' campaign is in response to the fact that 35% of all childhood deaths in Ireland are due to road traffic accidents, and half of these are pedestrians. Over 60% of seriously injured children who present as trauma emergencies are injured on the road, the vast majority of them while out walking or cycling.
Despite the fact that Wednesday's launch was predominantly a light-hearted affair, Commissioner Drew Harris told the 250 children present that they had his full permission to “pester your parents, grandparents, older brothers and sisters” to behave responsibly on the roads. “You can be the educators of the adults” he said “and I have no doubt you will do a very good job.”