'You could have killed one of us' - Longford schoolchildren confront speeding drivers

A Longford woman is at the helm of a local initiative set up to help enforce safe driving around schools in the county where drivers literally face a Kids' Court rather than taking penalty points and a fine.

Janine Bartley, Community Safety Coordinator at Longford Local Community Safety Partnership, discussed what the initiative is all about during an interview with the Hard Shoulder on Newstalk on Monday, March 30.

The initiative gives drivers who are caught speeding in school areas in Longford the choice between accepting penalty points or face stern questions from a panel of primary school children. It was first introduced in Northern Ireland by the PSNI but has now been adopted in Longford and used at 14 different schools.

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Longford adopted this concept in 2023 and the schools work alongside An Garda Siochana and safety coordinators to confront people speeding near school zones.

"So we rehearse with the children, so the class, is put into groups. Each group gets to rehearse and we prepare them for speaking to the drivers," Janine explained.

"The gardai set up the checkpoint outside the school, and once they're ready, we get going and do the checkpoints, and every time that we've done it, we've done it in 14 schools now in Longford, we've got several drivers each time that have agreed to speak to the children," she added.

Janine explained that "the drivers can take their fixed charge penalty notice and their penalty points, or they agree to come in to answer the questions. So it's fully by consent of the driver.

"We have had some people who would rather take the penalty points than come in and face the questions from the children.

"We have had all sorts, we've had delivery drivers, we've had someone who was driving farm machinery, someone who was running late for work, we've had young drivers, we've had someone who was a parent of a child that was in the class," Janine said.

She said children ask the drivers different questions to make them think about the reality of why speeding outside a school is so dangerous.

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"So the first thing is, did you know the speed limit of the road you've just driven down? And not a lot of the time that they do, and the student will remind them, yes, it is 40, or it is 50 kilometres an hour.

"Then they're asked, do you realise you were going too fast? And if they did realise, why were you speeding? If they didn't realise, why were you not aware of the speed limit here?

"So again, it's getting the driver to think about their own driving behaviour. The next question, then, is, did you realise that this was a road with a school on, that children might be crossing? And the second part of that question is probably the most hard hitting - do you realise that you could have killed one of us?" 

Janine said that the last question is one "where you can feel the inhalation of air and it's deadly silent, as the driver contemplates that, and the children are waiting to hear the answer.

After that then they ask about stopping distances, so the faster a car is going if it hits a child or a person, the more likely they are to be killed or seriously injured.

"If I had stepped out in front of your car, would you have had time to react? And again, the driver is having to think about that, well, it's not something that I had thought of before.

"And then finally, it's, do you think you'll speed again? The answer is always, I'll definitely never speed again."

Janine said this initiative is in the works to be rolled out in other areas across the country.

"There's now a community safety partnership in every local authority area, just after been set up over the last couple of months.

"So we're going to be working with them now and we're preparing a suite of documentation that hopefully will be able to work with their own community police and teams and the local authority teams in their area, and hopefully we will see this initiative rollout in other places across Ireland as well," Janine said on Newstalk.

Janine said on Newstalk that "this is going to have to be a range of different interventions and things that we do to try and reduce reduce speeding.

"This is about driver behaviour and getting drivers to think about their behaviour, but it's also about other road users being cognisant as well. So for those young people, it's about them being passengers in the car. What are they doing around distractions? What are we doing about mobile phones? And a wider conversation about road users, and it's not just about cars either.

"So in the rural schools, we would always have really good conversations about farm machinery, the increase of that kind of thing on the road. The use of e-scooters, cyclists, kids are cycling to and from school. So it's part of a much broader conversation."

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Janine said that this help the young school children to go home and have important conversations with their families around safe driving too.

"It's about making sure everybody has a role to play. And for us, it's about empowering young people to be active in community safety and doing that in their in their own community. So for them, they feel empowered and that they have a role in asking questions and making their community safer. So I think it's fantastic to start to start at that age."

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