National Vehicle and Driver File, Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2026: Second Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Ciarán Ahern (LAB), Dublin South-West

The Labour Party absolutely supports the main thrust of this Bill, which is to improve data sharing between the State bodies responsible for road safety, that is, An Garda Síochána, the RSA and our local authorities. At present, the information exists but the people who need that information to make our roads safer do not necessarily have access to it. That situation has been allowed to persist for too long. Nevertheless, I welcome the Bill being introduced at Second Stage today. If a person is seriously injured on a road, if there is a collision at a dangerous junction, if gardaí repeatedly attend the same stretch of road or if local residents have been reporting a danger for years, that information should not disappear into the database of one public body and become inaccessible to another. It should be shared across the competent and relevant authorities to inform what happens next.
The purpose of road safety data is not just to produce statistics; it is to prevent the next collision from happening. My Labour Party colleagues and I are very supportive of the provisions in this Bill that allow road authorities to request and process collision data to identify and assess safety risks to plan for road maintenance, junction redesign and so on and know where the resources need to be targeted. The Bill specifically provides that An Garda Síochána or another public authority may disclose collision data to a road authority or nominated local authority for those purposes. It also provides safeguards around the processing of personal data.
That is all very welcome but we have to ask why it has taken this long. We have known for years that there is a problem with the fragmentation of road safety data. Road safety campaigners have been banging this drum for a long time. In a previous debate on road safety in this House, I spoke about the frustration of public representatives who know the dangerous locations in their communities but who cannot always access the data necessary to understand the full picture. I know of several in my constituency and I am sure my constituency colleagues would point the Minister of State to the exact same spots. The issue is pretty straightforward. A local authority cannot properly redesign a dangerous road if it does not have information about what is actually happening on that road. It cannot always accurately identify black spots or junctions that are particularly dangerous for vulnerable road users like pedestrians or cyclists. It basically cannot identify patterns because the information is sitting in a different organisation.
That is why this part of the Bill is really important. We should be moving toward a system where collision information is routinely used to identify locations of interest, where local authorities are able to intervene quickly and where the State has national oversight of dangerous locations.
Fatalities are the most visible part of the road safety crisis but we also need to look at serious injuries that are happening on our roads. My colleague and the Labour Party's health spokesperson, Deputy Marie Sherlock, has done some important work in this area. There is a gap between Garda collision statistics and hospital data. Thousands of people are hospitalised following road collisions whose injuries are not necessarily reflected in the same way in the national collision statistics. What this means is that, once again, we risk making decisions based on an incomplete picture. This also needs to be addressed. If a person is seriously injured because of the way our road system is designed, that information should be available to help us make the system safer. In May, the RSA published an interactive map of road traffic injury collisions covering fatal, serious and minor injury collisions between 2016 and 2024. This is a really useful step towards transparency and evidence-based decision making. However, that information has to lead to action. We need local authorities to have the power, the resources and the obligation to act when the evidence tells us that a road is dangerous.
That brings me to the wider context of this Bill. Road traffic legislation is not merely an administrative exercise. Ireland is in the middle of a road safety crisis and I do not think any of us are being hyperbolic when we say that. The RSA figures tell us that very clearly. There has been enormous progress over the longer term; we should acknowledge that. Ireland has gone from hundreds of road deaths a year to figures that, for a period, were among the best in Europe. That progress is not something we should take for granted, but I fear that the eye has been taken off the ball. The RSA's long-term figures show a rise in road deaths from 134 in 2018 to 185 in 2025. The Garda figures report 190 deaths in 2025 as they include deaths in public places such as car parks and private roads. The Bill does not address this but we also need to clarify which are the more accurate figures when it comes to deaths as a result of cars. I would argue that the Garda figures are more complete in that regard but that is a discussion for another day.
Tragically, regardless of whose figures we use - those of the Garda or the RSA - the trend of increasing fatalities shows no signs of reversing this year. At the end of July, 105 people had already lost their lives on Irish roads, or 13 more than at the same point in 2025. More than 40% of fatalities occurred on Saturdays and Sundays. The RSA reports that 57% of fatalities occurred on roads with speed limits of 80 km/h or higher, while 27% of those killed were aged between 16 and 25. Every one of these road fatalities and every life lost will have left devastation in its wake for the thousands of people grieving the loss of their loved one. We have all seen the consequences in our communities. In February, a man in his 80s, Frank Daly, was killed when a Bus Éireann double-decker bus struck pedestrians not far from here on North Earl Street. Three other people were taken to hospital. In June, a man in his 30s died following a three-car collision on the M21 between Abbeyfeale and Newcastle West. His death brought the number of people killed on Irish roads at that point in the year to 75, six higher than in the previous year. In July, three men were killed in separate collisions in Donegal, Cork and Kildare in the space of a single day. In August, we witnessed an absolutely devastating collision on the M9 in Kildare, where five teenagers lost their lives in a head-on collision after a car travelled on the wrong side of the motorway. Four other people, a family including a child who were on their way to Dublin Airport to go on holiday, were seriously injured. I am so glad to have seen an update from the three sisters yesterday to say they are getting stronger each day, and I wish them the very best as they continue their recovery.
These sorts of devastating events stay with communities. They stay with the emergency workers who respond to them - the gardaí and anyone who happens to witness them - and above all, they stay with the families who are impacted by them. The barometer against which we have to measure every piece of road traffic legislation, such as this one, is whether it will make our roads safer. On the data-sharing element of this, I am confident this Bill will do that. On the speed limits element, though, which comes under Part 5 of the Bill, I cannot say I am quite as convinced. In fact, I find this part of the Bill a little concerning. Section 21 provides for local authorities to be able to continue to set a special speed limit of 60 km/h for local roads in built-up areas. The Minister will be aware there is a long-standing campaign, with many different advocacy groups calling for a default urban speed limit of 30 km/h. I support this campaign. At the very least, the sensible approach would be to standardise urban road speed limits. At present, a road speed limit could be 60 km/h but if you were to transplant that exact same road into a different area, it would be 50 km/h. It creates ambiguity, and when it comes to road safety and the rules of the road, ambiguity poses a genuine danger. It also sends the wrong message about allowing higher speeds in built-up areas. Drivers could legitimately ask why it is okay for one road to have a speed limit of 60 km/h but another road to have one of 50 km/h in very similar areas. They may be tempted to put the foot down a little bit more as a result, seeing a sort of unfairness there.
My clear position is that we should be reducing urban speed limits to 30 km/h. It is increasingly becoming the international norm. It is also the policy direction that this State has already legislated for. The Road Traffic Act 2024 provided for a default 30 km/h speed limit in built-up areas. The ink was hardly dry on that Act, though, before the Government started to roll back on it. I have tabled a number of parliamentary questions to try to ascertain why the Government was effectively moving away from the national default approach and instead instructing local authorities to introduce 30 km/h speed limits through special speed limit zones. I have never really received a satisfactory response. Generally, all I get is that it is too difficult. Once again, that is not good enough. The question should not be about whether moving from 50 km/h to 30 km/h speed limits in built-up areas is difficult or not. It should be about whether it would save lives and prevent serious injuries. The relationship between speed and the severity of pedestrian collisions is well established. Around 5% of pedestrians would be killed at an impact speed of 30 km/h, compared with approximately 50% at 60 km/h and 90% at 80 km/h. There is an extraordinary difference there. At 30 km/h, we give someone a fighting chance. At higher speeds, the consequences of a mistake become drastically, dramatically more severe.
Speed limits are not about how we get drivers from A to B most efficiently. They are about what happens when something goes wrong, like a child running out onto a road, a cyclist falling off their bike in the middle of traffic or a driver getting distracted for a second or two. We cannot build a road system around the assumption that everyone will behave perfectly all the time. Our road system should be designed so that those mistakes do not automatically become fatal or risk life-changing injuries for those involved. The case for reducing urban speed limits to 30 km/h is clear, based on the evidence from places where this has been done. Wales, for example, introduced a default 20 miles per hour speed limit on restricted roads in built-up areas in September 2023. Early evidence showed average speeds falling by around 4 miles per hour on a sample of main roads. In 2024, casualties on roads in Wales with 20 miles per hour and 30 miles per hour limits combined were almost 20% lower than in the year before. It is a relatively short period of data but the direction of travel is encouraging. It is certainly a lot better than the direction we have been heading in for some time now here. The Welsh Government has also estimated that the introduction of 20 miles per hour limits could prevent deaths and serious injuries while delivering wider economic and public health benefits.
We can also look to Spain. They introduced a nationwide urban 30 km/h limit on streets with a single lane in each direction in 2021. Urban road deaths fell by 20% in 2021 compared with 2019. Their directorate general for traffic specifically linked the reduction to a package of urban road safety measures, including the 30 km/h limit. Pedestrian deaths fell by 26%, cyclist deaths by 34% and deaths among people over 64 by 31%. Five years on, Spain continues to see a positive trend, with urban fatalities in 2024 5% below 2019 levels, while cyclist fatalities in cities were almost 19% lower and pedestrian fatalities more than 16% lower. The case for reducing urban speed limits as a default is not theoretical. This is what happens when governments decide that speed in urban areas should be designed around the safety of humans rather than the convenience of the fastest possible journey.
I pay particular tribute to the Love 30 campaign group, which has been to the fore in calling for 30 km/h to be the default speed limit in built-up areas in Ireland, particularly in town centres, residential areas and around schools and places of public assembly. I had the pleasure of hosting Love 30 here in Leinster House for an audiovisual room briefing on the campaign, alongside other organisations including the Dublin Commuter Coalition, Irish Doctors for the Environment, Cycling Ireland, An Taisce, the Irish Road Victims Association and community groups from around the country, all of which support the default urban speed limit of 30 km/h.
Whether it is pedestrians, cyclists, children on their way to school, older people going to do their shopping, people with disabilities navigating pavements and crossings, commuters waiting for a bus or teenagers hanging out with friends, we have to design our roads and institute a road safety system for all of these people. We also have to keep an eye on enforcement.
That is the other side of this debate. A speed limit that is not enforced is just a number on a sign. There was a 23% increase in motorists caught speeding last year. I do not know if we have got better in terms of enforcement or if just more people are speeding; I suspect the latter. We need to take a holistic approach to enforcement.
The obvious place to look is the decline in the number of gardaí involved in roads policing and our failure to address that despite several promises over the years. We have the authorities, the strategies, the targets, the awareness campaigns and announcements but the gardaí tasked with enforcing the law on our roads are being asked to do more and more with too few resources. In May 2024, we were promised an additional 150 gardaí specifically for roads policing by 2025. We got 15. If we go back further, the picture is even worse. There are almost 400 fewer gardaí working in roads policing today than in 2009, while there are more than half a million more cars on Irish roads.
I do not believe the roads policing position will get any better this year given the increased demands on our gardaí due to the hosting of the EU Presidency and the circus around Donald Trump at the Irish Open last week. Enforcement has become so much more difficult as a result and the odds of being caught for those who break the rules of the road are increasingly in their favour. Driver behaviour naturally adapts to this new reality. We have also been incredibly slow at rolling out stationary speed cameras and traffic light cameras. I was very pleased to see Deputy Shane Moynihan raising this with the Taoiseach yesterday; maybe he listened to him. It beggars belief that we still only have nine fixed speed camera sites in the country.
Road design should also form part of the overall enforcement strategy from a proactive preventative perspective. I hope that the data-sharing element of this Bill will have a positive impact in that regard. We need to redesign the dangerous locations identified through collision data and crucially we need to give local authorities the resources to do so. The Government's own road safety strategy has a target of reducing road deaths and serious injuries by 50% by 2030. The baseline for that was 144 deaths per year and a target of 72 or fewer and yet we recorded 185 deaths on public roads last year. We cannot look at these figures and conclude that the current approach is working; much more needs to be done.
I want to briefly touch on the RSA given its role as a competent authority when it comes to road safety. The Minister of State will know that I have my concerns about the apparent rollback in the Government's commitment to reform the RSA and split it into two separate bodies as recommended in the 2024 Indecon report. As I have said on many occasions, there is an inherent conflict at the heart of the RSA in that it is both poacher and gamekeeper when it comes to vehicles on our roads. On the one hand it is tasked with making our roads safer and sometimes that can mean fewer cars on the road but on the other it is incentivised to keep adding more and more cars onto the road because it administers and is funded through driving tests and the NCT. Those functions need to be split. Let one body deal with driving tests and another deal exclusively with road safety.
I support the concept of an independent commission for safety with real powers to intervene and to take politics out of our decisions on road safety. Whatever model it takes we need a much more active authority in the road safety space. South Dublin County Council recently ran a consultation on proposals to install large digital advertising boards in various locations around the county. It was really welcome to see the RSA make a submission detailing the potential hazards that these huge electronic billboards would cause in terms of driver distraction. At the same South Dublin County Council and local authorities all over the country have been carrying out a speed limit review but the RSA has not given any comment to my knowledge on any of those speed limit reviews. That is exactly an area where the RSA should be using its expertise and experience, and advocating for what it thinks is the safest thing for our roads. We need a much more active authority, an authority that will work with local authorities, engage in public consultations and share its expertise.
The vast majority of the Bill represents a positive step. I have spoken about the data-sharing piece but the provision around multi-offence incidents which were introduced in the Road Traffic Act 2024 is also a move in the right direction, as is the provision concerning careless driving which as the explanatory note to the Bill states arose from the report on the tragic death of Shane O'Farrell. However, the Bill could have gone further particularly with respect to the speed limit issue. I want to see the evidence lead us in the right decision on this. We should not use 60 km/h as a convenient compromise simply because it is already familiar. If a road is genuinely a major arterial route, we can assess it on its merits but in built-up areas the starting point should be 30 km/h. That is what the evidence tells us will prevent collisions and fatalities. If an exceptional road needs to be treated differently, there should be a process for that exception. That is a much better system than beginning with a higher speed and asking communities to fight their way down to something safer. The principle should be the opposite: start with safety then justify any departure from that. We cannot legislate our way out of every collision but we can design a system that makes collisions less likely and makes the inevitable human mistake less likely to result in death or serious injury.
I welcome the Bill insofar as it finally recognises that road safety depends on information being shared between the organisations responsible for our roads. Local authorities, the Garda and the RSA all need to be on the same page and working from the same evidence in terms of black spots and what needs attention. I sincerely hope that will have a positive effect. I urge the Minister of State to reconsider the approach on the speed limits. We should start with a default 30 km/h limit for built-up areas. We know that lower speed limits save lives and prevent life-changing injuries. The case has already been made by Wales and Spain, and the Road Traffic Act has already pointed us in that direction. I urge the Minister of State not to roll back any further on what was legislated for in that Act.

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Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17