RONAN KEATING HAS called for stronger penalties for those convicted of fatal road traffic offences.

His brother Ciarán Keating, 57, was travelling with his wife to see their son play a soccer match when he was killed in July 2023 after his vehicle collided with a car driven by Dean Harte, 22, in Co Mayo.

Harte’s Audi A3 veered onto the wrong side of the N5 and collided head-on with the car driven by Keating.

Ciarán’s wife, Annmarie, was hospitalised with life-threatening injuries after the collision and was not able to attend the funeral of her husband.

Harte, from Tyrellspass in Westmeath, was given a 17-month suspended sentence at Castlebar Circuit Court in Mayo in February after he pleaded guilty to careless driving causing death.

The sentence was suspended for two years, and Harte was also banned from driving for two years.

Before imposing the sentence in February, Judge Eoin Garavan said there was no evidence of intoxication, no speed issues and “no egregious example of earlier dangerous driving”.

The court heard Harte had sent a message on his phone shortly before the collision. 

A letter from Harte expressing genuine remorse had been rejected by Keating’s family.

‘The system is broken’

Speaking on RTÉ’s Drivetime on the sentence, the singer said: “You can’t get angry. You’re floored. You’re disappointed. The system is broken.

“All of the pain and the hurt is in losing somebody. This is just disgusting. It’s awful – this situation.”

He said it is now up to him and his family to “try to do something about it.”

“We won’t let this lie”, he added.

“As a family, we don’t want to send some 22-year-old kid to jail. We don’t want to see some kid go to jail whose life is going to be thrown away. That’s not what we’re looking for.

“But what we’re looking for is to make sure somebody else doesn’t die because of careless driving. That some other family’s life is not going to be ripped apart.”

“We’ve looked at other cases, other families and what they’ve gone through – some more recent than ours. It’s continuing to happen. Something needs to change,” he said.

Keating criticised the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to charge Harte with careless driving causing death, rather than a more serious offence. 

On the same RTÉ programme, Ciarán’s son Conall described his father as a “hero” and “mentor”.

“He was kind, gentle, proud man. Loved his family, loved his friends.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him or see him in things that I do, and I’d give anything just to have another day with him.”

Meanwhile, Ciarán’s brother Gerard said his confidence in the investigatory system was “rocked” after he found an impacted door of the car in a ditch 10 metres from the crash site two days later.

Ronan Keating said the discovery of the door should have been made by gardaí.

“There are many questions, many questions. We have so many questions, but we’re just a family.

“We’re just another family that have been scarred by this broken system.

“Ger went there and was doing a job that the police force here in Ireland should be doing. It should have been covered with a fine-tooth comb.”

Gerard Keating also told the programme that he was left with questions in the judicial system, adding that the family was “scarred”.

Conall Keating said he would like to see “credible deterrents” for drivers against careless and dangerous driving, adding that Ireland could “pioneer” solutions around tracking speeding and phone use within cars.

Asked if still believed the justice system was broken, Ronan Keating said the family had not seen any evidence of change since the sentencing.

“It’s up to us now, the family, to try to do something about it. We won’t let this lie.”

-With additional reporting from Press Association