National Vehicle and Driver File, Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17 ============================================================ Aidan Farrelly (SD), Kildare North I welcome the opportunity to debate this Bill on Second Stage. I look forward to tabling amendments on future Stages. Any debate such as this is always emotional because we often think of somebody we know who has been hurt or whose life has been prematurely lost on our roads and we automatically assume the legislation and enforcement are in place to ensure our safety on the roads. This is a welcome step but as the Minister of State accepted in his opening remarks, no one law or policy will be robust enough to ensure our roads are safe. I place no personal blame on anybody for this but it is intriguing that while we are, in comparison with our EU colleagues, quite below the average as regards road fatalities, I am concerned, as a youth worker and a dad of young people considering entering the roads as drivers, that for the age cohort of 16 to 25 years, we are disproportionately represented in fatalities. Our policy, training response and legislative response need to be evidence based and must have that in mind. Over the summer, I launched the idea of a driver theory test programme that would really look at that evidence and robustly engage with the next generation of road users, whether drivers, cyclists, e-scooter users or pedestrians. For a very small sum of annual funding - it is fully costed at about €5.5 million - 50 development officers could be hired in the RSA and sent out to schools to give a universal driver and road user training programme that would culminate in a fully funded driver theory test. We all know in this Chamber that to take control of a vehicle of any type is to take control of a significant weapon, yet what we have seen in cultural norms and behaviours that have evolved online or in person is that sometimes reality and perception are very different in that generation. This initiative would provide universal training in transition year or fifth year, in youth services or youth clubs to ensure young people can see, feel and learn the realities of what it is to be a road user behind the wheel of a car, as a pedestrian or a cyclist. I ask the Minister of State and his officials to consider that as part of budget 2027. It already happens ad hoc . I accept the RSA has a training programme but we are relying on teachers and gardaí in the community who are already overburdened with work and cannot do it robustly and universally across the State. This is an attempt to offer that. As part of the legislation, the Minister of State spoke about removing the need for physical tax discs in vehicles. I have had a bone to pick with this Government since I was elected a couple of years ago. I have always felt irked that I pay 13% more each year for my road tax if I do not have the funds to pay for it annually versus paying for it every three months. That is punitive. The costs are not representative of that punitive damage of 13%. It is certainly not 13% more in administrative costs to produce the discs, send a reminder email or post it out every three months. The Government now has an opportunity and I am offering something of a political win for the Minister of State. If there are no more hard copies of tax discs, that negates the need for any discrepancy between the cost of taxing your car every three months and doing so every 12 months. Only a certain cohort can pay upfront for 12 months. A lot of people cannot. We want people to continue taxing their cars and paying the tax. Let us do away with the 13% difference because all that does is punish people who cannot afford it. I was a councillor for a few years before I was elected to the Dáil. I could never understand how the body responsible for designing our roads never had access to collision data. I welcome that this is part of the legislation. It has the potential to ensure real-time engineering solutions are provided in hotspots or prevalent collision areas. I am worried it could become a bureaucratic mess to access data. While there is a legislative route, will the Minister of State provide more detail as to what that will look in practice for local authorities? Will there be a live interactive map updated consistently? Will there be certain thresholds of collisions? I will give the example of the R403 in Kildare. It is probably the longest stretch of straight road in the country. I have yet to find someone who disagrees with me. It is about 10 miles long, possibly even more and it is ruler-straight. At certain times of day, people are driving into stark sunshine at sunrise or sunset. It is also collision-heavy at crossroads. There have been tragedies along that road very recently and throughout the past decades. That the council did not have access to that information in a timely way to bring in engineering solutions does not make sense. I welcome this measure but I ask for further information as to how that communication will be conveyed between the Garda and the local authority. The Government has missed a trick in some ways. I commend the response with regard to e-scooters over the summer. The Social Democrats had a different proposal, which was to register e-scooters. People would have had to register those vehicles in the same way as a car or anything else. We could still go a way towards doing that as part of this review. If the Minister of State is considering that, he has my full support because it is as dangerous a weapon as many of the other weapons we ask be registered in the State. That is another consideration. I do not want to repeat the points already made but I attach myself to the sentiment that even with the best will in the world of all of us here, including the Minister of State's officials in the Department who put together this strong legislation, proper enforcement and education are needed. The legislation is only one part of that jigsaw. I have put some proposals on education before the Minister of State that I ask him to consider. Equally, I ask him to convey that message on enforcement to his colleagues in the Cabinet. The gardaí we have are doing what they can, but we can all agree that the bodies on the ground are not there, the training is not there and ultimately the back-up from society is not there to support them so that when they need to intervene, we will back them as opposed to them being prosecuted for trying to get involved in these incidents. I look forward to contributing to this discussion further on Committee Stage and commend the Minister of State on the work so far. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-17