National Vehicle and Driver File, Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2026: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17 ============================================================ Seán Crowe (SF), Dublin South-West I welcome the Bill. It is mainly technical, but I want to draw attention to the fact that many Irish roads are becoming increasingly dangerous. You just have to go outside the door here to see people breaking lights on a regular basis. When you are driving on the M50, there is scary stuff happening out there. As others have said, there are rising road deaths and serious collisions caused by dangerous driving. Inadequate Garda enforcement and years of Government inaction have created a safety crisis that is costing lives. It is families across Ireland who are paying the price of Government failure on road safety. Rising road deaths are not unavoidable accidents. They are the consequence of years of underinvestment, inadequate Garda traffic enforcement and a lack of urgency from the Government. They are also down to bad behaviour by drivers. The statistics on those driving the wrong way down motorways are really worrying. The figures are going the wrong way rather than the right way in that regard. I will touch on some issues that are not in the Bill. One of the issues that constantly comes up in my area and across the State is the use of nitrous oxide. It is not a banned substance. Residents ring in to say there is somebody sitting in a car outside their house taking nitrous oxide and driving off. They contact the Garda and are told the fact it is not a banned substance means there is very little the Garda can do about it. This is happening on a regular basis. The evidence can be seen on the side of the road, at parking spots, at beauty spots and so on right across the State. Deputy Mark Ward and I have a Bill coming up. We are hoping there might be something in relation to that. A couple of things are happening in the community. There are stolen cars. I have been a victim myself. My car was robbed recently. I was lying in bed when someone went around using the fob. It impacts on communities. I was away for a couple of days and got a phone message from a woman saying there was a stolen car in her area. It was 1.40 p.m. For four days, there were stolen cars in that community. I remember trying to deal with this issue 20 or 25 years ago. Many of us thought this was behind us but, unfortunately, it is on the rise again. Some of it is down to the new technology as well. Cars are not safe enough. I want to talk about scramblers. I was driving along the quays opposite the High Court and a guy was coming down with a balaclava on his head. We had the incident of Deputy Michael Healy-Rae getting assaulted and it will be up before the court but this guy had a balaclava on and was on a scrambler bike on one of the main roads in Dublin right across from the courts. We are allowing this to happen in our city. That was on the quays but it is happening in my area as well. The gardaí have tried to respond, seize vehicles and so on but we are not doing enough. We need to empower the gardaí. It is probably a non-issue for the Bill today but we all need to wake up in this House to what is happening in our communities. Theft of cars is on the rise. It is in many working-class communities but not exclusively so. They are robbing the cars from everywhere and people have to deal with the financial loss of that. In many cases, it is older cars; it is the car that brings the kids to school or the car that brings people to shops. We need to do more and look at new ways of tackling these issues. --- 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