Road Safety
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-30
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Pa Daly (SF), Kerry

The Minister mentioned that there had been progress on all actions but, unfortunately, that is not seeping down into the road death figures, which are going in the wrong direction. It is not the Minister's brief but I want to refer to the number of gardaí on the roads. It is a consequence of inaction by the Government. There are 400 fewer gardaí on the roads than there were 15 years ago. The number of gardaí in that Garda unit has halved since 2009. We received a briefing the other day from Alcohol Action Ireland. There are some very worrying statistics in its brochure. It said that, in 2025, there were 4,800 arrests for drink driving. That compares to almost 20,000 in 2007. The rate of breath-testing among licensed drivers is only 5.3% whereas in other countries it is multiples of that. The consequences of that are that while 14% of driver fatalities in Australia, for example, have a positive toxicology for alcohol, that figure is 35% in Ireland.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-30