Safety boss gets Maxol award

24 November 2003: Eddie Shaw (on right), chairman of the National Safety Council, is the Maxol Irish Motor Industry Person of the Year 2003. (Pic by Mark McCall.)

He was presented with the award today by Tom Noonan, MD of Maxol Ireland Ltd, at a lunch attended by An Tanaiste, Mary Harney TD.

The winner was selected from 10 monthly winners of the competition, organised by Irish Motor Management magazine.

Mr Shaw said it was an honour and a privilege to get the award, but he added that there was still much to be done to improve road safety in Ireland. Though there had been a significant improvement in the last few years, more than 300 people were stilly being killed annually on Ireland’s roads.

“In order to get to the level of the best country’s performance in this regard, though it would even then be unacceptable, we need to get that figure down to 200 people killed in a year,” he said.

He recalled that before his present position he had worked for 30 years in the insurance industry, where he had to deal with the financial results of car accidents. But it wasn’t until he met a young woman in the National Rehabilitation Centre, paralysed from the waist down after a car accident on the Naas Road, that he realised the awful human side of the motor crash situation.

Previous winners of the award are Jim Callery (1998), Eddie Jordan (1999), Bill Cullen (2000), Tom Kiernan (2001) and Dorothea Dowling (2002).

©2003 irishcar.com