Hard hitting Road Safety Message for Mayo teenagers

The AXA Roadsafe roadshow delivered a hard-hitting road safety message to 1,400 Mayo teenagers last month. The AXA Roadsafe Roadshow is aimed at transition and senior year students and is based on an award winning format that graphically depicts how a night out can end in tragedy.

With a backdrop of contemporary music, video clips and television advertisements, the tragic sequence of events were unfolded. Presented by Gardaí, ambulance personnel, a fire officer, an Accident & Emergency consultant and a representative from a victim support group, the show culminated in a presentation by a young victim of a road traffic collision.

This year’s event heard a harrowing and powerful speech from accident survivor Micilín Feeny. Micilín was enjoying a night out playing cards in a pub on Halloween night, 2004. He had spent most of the evening in the pub drinking and decided to get behind the wheel of the car to drive home. He fell asleep behind the wheel of the car….

4 weeks in a coma and 8 months on a hospital bed gave him plenty of time to reflect. Today, Micilín’s brain injuries affect his speech, balance and memory. What an awful price to pay for one mistake. Unfortunately Micilín is not a unique case. Only last month on Newstalk 104 I heard similar and tragic stories of teenagers ending up in horrible car accidents because they were distracted by their mobile or changing CDs.

As Seamus Merity, Head of Marketing at AXA and official sponsor of the Roadsafe Roadshow series commented: “As one of the largest insurance groups in Europe we deal with hundreds of claims every week as a result of traffic collisions. The effects are well documented and young people are particularly over-represented.”

It is important at this time of the year with St. Patrick’s day and the Easter holidays on the way that we should all take care on the roads.