The death of a mother, Una Bowden, aged 47, and her daughters Ciara, aged 14, and 9-year-old Saoirse, cuts deep with everyone.

The mum and daughters were living in the Maigh Cuilinn area of Co Galway and are believed to have been travelling home when the crash occurred.

Efforts to contact the father and husband of the deceased were complicated by the fact that he was abroad for work. Gardaí yesterday confirmed that they had been in touch with Mr Bowden and that arrangements were being made for him to return to Ireland.

It's hard to imagine the effect on the Bowden family, loved ones, friends, and community. Most of us never knew them, yet a dark cloud is upon us all. It is, in many ways, a national tragedy. I think of those children awaiting Easter eggs, of a mother happily driving with her girls.

It would have been a normal day, they always are when tragedy strikes. For me, it was on the first Tuesday of September 2016.

I was out walking, casually chatting with a colleague, with no inkling that Donna, my beloved sister, lay dead on a city road in Dublin.

I sent a text to Donna about meeting up the following day, but it was a day that never came for her.

My sister was another fatal ‘statistic’ by then. Two gardaí came to my house to deliver the news, almost four hours after she had been killed while cycling to work.

I got that information alone and it changed me and the world as I knew it. That’s what is happening to another family in Mayo this week.

The sight of hearses leaving a crash scene, lives lost, or damaged beyond recognition, and what makes it worse? This is all preventable if we work together.

So far this year there have been 54 fatalities on the roads, an increase of 10 on the same period in 2023, which was already the worst year for almost a decade.

In March, we lost 14 lives in 26 days. It is chilling and demands attention and radical action. It is not a blame game, it’s about finding solutions.

Another issue that has reared its head again this week is that of people sharing images on social media of the immediate aftermath of a crash.

No condemnation is strong enough for those who circulate these images, doing so in many cases before family members of the deceased have been informed.

Gardaí have appealed for it to stop but I’d be of the view that people sharing the images should be reprimanded by the authorities.

I can’t fathom why anyone would think to take their phones out to film or photograph such devastation.

It’s abhorrent. Are we that desensitised? Have our phones robbed us of basic decency?

In truth, phones and social media aren’t to blame. People must take personal responsibility.

As far back as January 2019, I was advocating for this despicable behaviour to end.

Back then, it was a crash that claimed the life of Jacqueline Griffin on the M50.

Five years have passed and there has been no action by the government to make this a punishable offence.

This is an affront to those killed and their loved ones and must be stopped.

Labour TD Duncan Smith has a bill in the pipeline to address this phenomenon but we need to have cross-party cooperation.

Social media has become an avenue for spreading these pictures and videos that dehumanise victims and make collisions a type of theatre instead of the horrendous reality that they are.

As a country, there’s no from the facts, 2024 is shaping up to be worse than last year.

Only a few years back, Ireland was winning international awards for road safety improvements.

I appeal directly to Minister Simon Harris, the Taoiseach-in-waiting, to put road safety at the very centre of a ministerial portfolio.

Enough is enough. Will the third Taoiseach of this government listen to reason? I hope so.