I feel the quality of driving has gone down so insanely in recent years. Like, I see daily occurrences of utter nut cases, breaking lights, pulling out in front of people, going crazy speeds. You go into car parks and so many people have abandoned trying to park straight between the lines.
It's like this horrific selfishness has crept into people. "I'm gonna do what I want, when I want, and I couldn't care less about the risks!"
I'm amazed the death stats are as low as they are with the shit I see on the roads.
In Galway; green lights mean go, orange means speed up as much as possible and red means "well another 2 or 3 can definitely push through". People on their phones meandering across the centre line and the hard shoulder, speeding, undertaking in the bus lanes, unsecure loads, all sorts of shenanigans.
Id say what's keeping our numbers down is the drop off in popularity of mopeds, less motorbikes used as daily drivers and piss poor bicycle uptake.
Not excusing people trying to sneak through the lights but Galway needs to stop allowing building of anything until it is properly bypassed. It’s horrendous. The traffic is absolutely insane.
As an increasingly infrequent visitor Galway it is a traffic hell hole and your local political representation act like hicks who cannot even imagine an alternative to a car. It's the definition of how local politics ruin this country.
There is no vision, at all!
It's badly needed, as well as a whole heap of other things.
Id love to see some ambition in transport projects. How about everything inside of the quince pedestrianised/cycle access with a tram network and some fuck off multistorey car parks outside?
Realistically still need another bridge over the corrib, you'd be taking the old ones out of action and we've too many people that need to cross and can't be expected to go up and over the lake.
I agree kind of, my parents live out on the Cappagh Road, the nearest Tesco is 2 miles away….they’re too old to ride bikes etc. but yeah, I can’t understand why you would spend an hour in traffic then the hassle of parking , rather than walk…and the walks are very scenic & enjoyable
I looked into the stats. 2025 only has number of deaths for now. Details on the breakdown can only be done from 2024 or earlier. Don't shoot any messengers here but there has been an increase in the amount of people using e-scooters. E-bikes and even normal bikes have never been more popular. However, they are dying more too. Accelerating on orange or squeezing past a red light is not causing the increase, I can't even find one instance of that from 24. (I'm sure there were non fatal collisions) Anyway ill cut to the meat, the increase in unprotected road users and the increase of automatic cars and phone use has caused a spike in urban areas (phone plus over 50km per hour, survivability increases under 50). Remove that spike and we are trending downwards like normal since 2009
I said it before but I truly believe COVID changed society for the worse in a way no other event in history did. People are just different now than they were in 2018. Not sure if it's politics, social media or what but there was a major worldwide shift in society in the last 5-7 years
Some studies from the onset of the pandemic suggest that COVID-19 specifically damages the Prefrontal Cortex. Would explain a lot if that was the case. One report even suggested traffic collisions were more likely to happen to people who were vaccine adverse.
You see it everywhere unfortunately, not just in driving. People ruining your cinema experience with their phones and noise, same on public transport or in any public space. Horrific selfishness indeed.
And the entitlement when called on the antisocial levels of behaviour makes things worse. Kinda have to be ready to throw a few digs now if ye even suggest someone chill out or lower their voice
Kinda have to be ready to throw a few digs now if ye even suggest someone chill out or lower their voice
You definitely do, there's a huge amount of people out there now who feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to throw down over the smallest of things
Yeah, but I nearly dismiss the cinemas and public transport as a predominantly teenager issue. In those circumstances, it's usually younger people, whereas something like driving is obviously an "adult" issue.
Mind, the shit behavior of those kids comes from somewhere....
I know it's going to be anecdotal, but as someone who goes to the cinema twice a month or so, it's been entirely a teen issue for me, personally. Genuinely never had an issue with grown ups.
Mine is anecdotal too, but I've found in the last few years middle-aged couples can also be dreadful - my guess is they spent lockdown in front of a screen inhaling comfort food without having to worry about noise.
I've had more issues with grown ups than teens (often when I tell a teen or kid to shut up they will, it's only ever adults who've attempted to assault or make a scene out of it) but again that's anecdotal
Yup. I had to ask a bloke two rows in front of me to put his iPad sized phone away during a trip to the cinema, he had it out for half the movie on high brightness. Like I couldn't concentrate on the movie screen at all because of it.
Different time had to put up with some aul wan answering phone calls and texting for some of the movie, someone else who was closer to her asked her to shut up and she walked out of the cinema to take a call. Like that wasn't the first fucking sensible thing to do if you're in the cinema. If I am watching a movie, I cancel the call and text them to say in the cinema text me. Or I leave the theatre if it's an emergency/important call.
It’s not a teen issue, I’ve seen grown adults listen to absolute rubbish on public transport while also observed grown adults looking at their phones in the cinema, so its not a “predominantly teenager issue”
It’s not. Everyone is out for themselves and fuck you if you comment on their anti social behaviour. Cinema is not your front room. Stay off your phone for an hour and shut up
Only two days back, I was in the cycle lane on my scooter on a busy road. A car overtook me, then pretty much immediately afterwards (as in 20-30 metres later) started veering into the cycle lane and slowing.
I was flashing lights, ringing my bell, and shouting at them (the passenger window was open) but they just kept slowly moving in on me, I am assuming in expectation that I would just stop and allow allow them to take a break while I stood there in the cold behind them. There is literally no way they could not have seen me. As far as they were concerned "my car weighs 2,00bs and your scooter weighs less than 50... therefore I have right of way, and your cycle lane is now my personal car park."
I refused to stop for them and made things very uncomfortable, so they then just stopped outright, leaving me less than 2ft of cycle path to go by on. I roared in abuse at them through the open window, but honestly regret not kicking a massive dent in the side of their car. There is literally no other way these types of people will learn, since traffic enforcement basically doesn't exist in this country.
I'm ordering a camera for the scooter now, and next time I may just continue to carry on straight, hit into them if that's what has to happen, and get ready to make a claim.
I agree with this to some extent but it's up to drivers to follow the rules too. Everyone knows them, the idea that a guard has to enforce them is ricidulous. You'd have to have so many guards at every junction and traffic lights that we'd live in a police state
We need the frequency rates of nonlethal accidents compared to lethal ones. I feel like cars have gotten safer and there's more accidents and close calls but the death rate remains relatively steady proportional because of safety efforts.
To me lack of enforcement is the number one issue. Zero consequences.
At least one car breaking red lights at speed through pedestrian crossings is guaranteed on busy roads now. It's scary because imo it's definitely more prevalent on ped only crossing than junctions, probably because there's less risk of damage to their vehicle. It's so frequent I've started to visibly do a quick fakeout putting my foot out as soon as lights are turning orange just to force cars to actually start slowing down and stopping.
I just found out yesterday in Dublin City at least, they've started increasing the time between red lights for cars and turning green for pedestrians to cross to help mitigate against this behaviour. There's a crossing on Malahide road that the lights were upgraded recently really I noticed the delay for the green man
Someone ran a stop sign in front of me so I blasted the horn at them. I pulled in to park a little bit later and they started complaining to me about using the horn after they had just rolled through a Stop sign!
What I've noticed, and I wonder has anyone else noticed, because I find it bizarre, is people watching TV, YouTube, TikTok, or something like that, while driving.
Anyone else notice that?
Even on the M50 (My comment is Dublin based observations)
Lights were out at a busy cross roads this morning. Some nutter blasted through them as if he has a green light. Didn’t bother to check if anyone else was making their way through
Probably, but "ah, lads, do better" clearly isn't cutting it as a response.
The statistics are surely there to allow the RSA, the Gardai and whatever the relevant departments are to actually address the most serious causes of this level of deaths and incidents.
This is 2003 all over again. Mobile phones were around for a while, but the cost of texting collapsed around then and suddenly we had tonnes of drivers texting behind the wheel.
Right before covid, we got 4G and most carriers had data packages which enable us to stream video on our phones. Fast forward to now, I can see into the car windows outside my house all day long, easily 5% of drivers are watching streaming content on their phones while driving.
All the other stuff listed... drink/drugs is maybe on the way back a small bit. We're not more tired or less skilled drivers and the roads are better.
4G may have launched at the end of 2013, into 2014, but the wide coverage mixed with the ever increasing transition away from TV and into phones for watching content was all a few years after that and it would have been totally bizarre to see someone watching video on the phone back then. No one was video calling on there phones until 2017/2018.
My point is that this combined with the Netflix/Disney/apple/prime/twitch explosion meant people en masse started using their phones to watch videos or tv as a normal behaviour in Covid (I'm generally an early adopters and I'd been watching video on my phone for years, but Covid really ramped it up).
Since Covid, folks are bingeing shows or live streams to the point where I they wanna waste a 30 minute drive listening to random radio and instead, wanna keep consuming their preferred content.
So we've got car after car with drivers looking down to their left to see who shot who or what have you just as the brake lights come on ahead of them.
It wasn't as common as it's become. Not nearly. Back in 2017, you might have one in a couple hundred cars where someone had a lit up phone down to their left playing a video. Now, it's one in 20 or worse - I'm ten years living on the main street with traffic below where you can always see it the phone is on beside the driver.
Loads are watching vertically so I'd assume tik tok or reels, but lots are horizontally watching movies/shows/YouTube.
100% this. Speed was the main cause of crashes 25 years ago. If you have a look at some of the more recent fatal crashes, and by the nature of the destruction, its speed. Again.
We had one of the lowest road deaths in Europe, we’ve slipped to one of the highest in a relatively short amount of time.
There’s not going to be a simple answer as to why that happened. I think the government is looking for a simple answer that they can throw money on a public awareness campaign then give themselves a pat on the back, the real answer is going to be more complicated and the Irish government is horrible at complexity.
We are nowhere near one of the highest road deaths in Europe. The stats for 2025 aren't out yet, but for 2024 we were joint 3rd lowest at a rate of 32 deaths per million. The EU average of 2024 was 45/million.
You didn't mention people driving much larger cars, that kill more pedestrians than smaller cars in collisions at the same speed. These larger cars also have poorer visibility for a driver to see pedestrians.
The article points out the numbers driving intoxicated and those caught speeding but definitely lacks a proper statistical analysis. Conjecture and hearsay are definitely kinds of evidence though
And our population is far higher now, I wonder how many additional drivers there are? Every death is obviously a tragedy but the roads are becoming safer per capita!
This is a fact and seems to be ignored in the race to sound the most outraged - Ireland has an incredibly-low number of road deaths per capita compared to all but a handful of countries, half of whom are micro states where traffic rarely gets above 60km/h
So would everyone but not a hope of the RSA releasing the actual stats.
Think an interesting stat would be length of the journey prior to the accident. People sitting in traffic for 4 hours a day 5 days a week is definitely going to have a knock on effect.
I spent 20 minutes behind a guy with YouTube up on his phone attached to the windscreen while driving. He couldn't keep straight and was varying from 20 under to 20 above. Worse than a drunk person. And you know full well he'd just turn it off if stopped by gards so no way to enforce it.
empower citizens to submit video recordings by passengers, pedestrians or dash cam which show the offence and punish it.
That being said, in the mid 2000s, when the cost of sending a text plummeted, we saw a surge in texting while driving and it led to a massive public clamdown by Gardai for anyone holding a phone while driving. It led to a real change in attitudes and a fear of getting points. It worked well enough, but now that the cost of streaming video on our phones is effectively zero, we need a fresh campaign of pressure to make it wholly unacceptable socially and create a fear that you can easily be caught. IT's absolutely solvable as a problem.
It's easy enough to enforce it if they were actually bothered. Put out one Garda on their existing Garda mountain bike with their existing Garda bodycam and they'll have hard evidence of loads of drivers using their phones on each shift. It's illegal to even have a phone on your lap, just waiting to distract you.
They could do this tomorrow if they changed their own "h'attitudes" but they won't.
This is a shite take and the “attitude that needs to change”
New Jersey and Helsinki have gone entire years without road deaths after lowering speed limits and redesigning junctions, yes these are cities but it’s not impossible
I think we've reached maximum saturation of people who will be affected by pleads of morality/humanity... anyone who will be affected by these ads and these calls to consider how they drive will have by now done so.
We now need enforcement and visibility. Cameras, guards, the whole lot.
People are lazy and form habits, often in line with the path of least resistance. If they start out the perfect driver, but theres no enforcement, habits and bad behaviour creep in over time as there is no consequences.
You are depending on the Gardai to enforce basic rules, or at least be visible and make it feel like drivers bad behaviour is being watched. otherwise its going to keep sliding to the lowest level that will still get them to where they want to go.
I'd love if this wasnt the case, but when youre dealing with people, this is how it is.
No it's all the kids that can't drive fault, because they didn't dress themselves in neon bubble wrap and wear flashing signs in the middle of the day. The driver would never have speeded or broke the lights if it wasn't for how the kids dressed.
There's plenty of good drivers just the problem is theres enough of a minority of childish sheeple all with the attitude that it's almost somebody else's fault ... "I broke the law because I saw somebody else did it first.." that's an excuse my 6 year old nephew uses not a grown adult!
I think it's down to each person's individual responsibility to adhere to the driving laws & best practice on our roads.
But yes, the people who decide that they don't have to adhere to these laws etc. are not going to change on their own. This is where better enforcement needs to come in. And even still, lots whinge & moan when they're caught breaking the laws.
I did notice that recent Garda road safety statements are thankfully becoming a bit more direct, instead of the previous only asking politely that people 'take care' and 'behave' on the roads. The volume of death and carnage on our roads really does require that the messaging becomes harsher & more explicit.
Personally, I also think that a campaign focusing on reporting people you know who are driving drunk etc. is way overdue. Too often people are expected to tackle these inebriated people themselves & it very often goes badly for a number of reasons (violence, power imbalance etc.), this is where the Gardaí could really make an impact that's absolutely within their remit.
That's the biggest load of bollocks I've heard today, well done! Honestly, blame the person driving; we're all adults who know the rules and have supposed to sat driving tests etc. Take some fucking responsibilty; they're not the ones making people be on their phones
I live in a rural area and the amount of houses built on small back roads is kinda insane, also all those houses have 2-4 cars depending on the amount of people living in the house. Same in housing estates. Various government and lots of local authorities have built a car centric towns and cities. All towns and cities have so much traffic.
Dismissing it as attitudes need to change is just words that are just offloading responsibility for the issue.
I also think we should blame the very poor design and maintenance of roads. There are some terribly designed junctions. There was one on my driving test in Navan that was actually dangerous.
Also the reduction of speeds on L roads from 80-50 km/h was beyond pointless and actually damaging. They needed a new classification of road or a lot of upgrades to the L roads BEFORE introducing the speed limit change. My rural road is L, decent road, plenty wide and maintained well and the small roads off it that are not wide enough for 2 cars. They are classified as the same.
Things need to change across the board and not just on the drivers side.
In the 1970's there was the equivalent of 5k to 6k road deaths per year when adjusting for cars on the road. It's incredibly safe today in comparison. We're also one of the top 10 countries in the world for road safety.
I'll probably be down voted here but so long as cars are driven by humans, and are subject to human error and misjudgement (including driving a car while under the influence of an intoxicant) then there will always be road deaths.
There are states in America that go years without even having an accident free day.
I don't mean to be an apologist for idiotic driving or even intoxicated driving but road fatalities will always be a particularly brutal and harrowing reality of life.
Yet driving has never been as objectively safer. Cars are fitted with all kinds of hardware and software to keep us safe, if I drift even a tiny bit out of the centre of a lane, my steering wheel automatically corrects it. I have a radar on the front of my car which sets the distance I can keep from the car in front of me. For this, we can at least be thankful.
How much has the population increased in the last 8-10 years since the low point? That alone probably accounts for the increase not to mentiont the amount of dreadful non EU drivers we have.
We have somewhere around 3 million vehicles in the country. Average private vehicle does ~15k km per year. So that's 45,000 million km travelled across the fleet. Lets not act like it's the wild west
Per RSA data every year there's about ~49,000 collisions. Of those, ~43000 are material damage only. 5500 have some form of injury, and obviously the remainder make up the <200 deaths.
We're already among the safest countries in the EU for road safety. The only countries with lower numbers are Sweden and Denmark. The EU average for road deaths per million inhabitants is 45. Ireland had 32.
All of the problems in this country and somehow this gets so much attention. There are roughly 6 or 7 countries in the entire world with safer roads (excluding microstates). The government are happy to keep the focus on the roads while the state decays in every other department
It's an over focused metric which the media like to use as a society rating. Everything is relative & we must accept some risk. There are 500 suicides per year in Ireland yet that never receives the same level of attention. Almost 100 people die everyday in this country, so 2 days worth of all deaths per year come from the roads.
Yeah it's a good example of misleading statistics. And Ireland has a huge amount of licensed drivers. Like the most per capita outside of malta.
This isn't forgiving nor saying nothing can be done. Other countries reduced their deaths. There are commonalities with our accidents we can solve for.
Ireland is one of the safest countries for road deaths. We were better, and have slipped a little, but overall it is still towards the safest in Europe (which is safest in the world).
Yeah looking at the stats, we haven't had over 200 deaths since 2010. People forget we've come along way from the 400+ during the 90s and 300+ during the 00s. I imagine a lot of that has to do with car safety standards though.
The reason for that has more to do with the fact that we rolled out our N and M roads later, and so they're better designed. Most of our deaths as a result occur in rural roads.
in canada we average about 2k deaths a year on 45 mil so its pretty close.
but then again we get lots of snow. Yesterday at a Mcdonalds drive thru the person in front of me side and rear windows were completely covered in snow so he had no visibility other than the front windshield.
Yes population has increased, but so has public transport usage and availability. Population isn't the figure you need to look at rather total Kms driven across the country. We should look at these statistics normalised for km driven not population
You're right, deaths per KMs driven would be a much more useful statistic. Maybe NCT centers would have the KMs data.
Still, I was just pointing out (without being insensitive to those who have lost loved ones on the roads) that 190 road deaths in a country with our population actually isn't terrible, IMO. Obviously, zero road deaths would be much better.
The data is already available and widely used. The reason for alarm is that the person km death rate was decreasing steadily until 2018. Since then it has shot up rapidly and is now 30% greater now. So today you're 30% more likely to die driving then you were in 2018.
I don't understand the outrage. The numbers are way down, and what's the percentage of this compared to the population of Ireland. We don't need more pointless regulation, which is where this will probably go.
Expecting or asking for common sense from people in moments like this is useless, more enforcement and tougher sentences with effective measures for drivers constantly breaking the rules are the best way. How many times do we see eejits still being caught by Garda after dozens of similar offences?
Last week I drove through three small towns after it got dark.
On four separate occasions, lads dressed head to toe in black ran across the road directly in front of me. No warning, no traffic lights, just full steam straight out, right in front of me. This happens semi-regularly when I'm driving through small towns, I dunno what the fuck.
RSA steadfastly refuse to publish details or make reports on WHY accidents happen.
We just get "speed kills", "don't drink and drive", which people ignore. People need to know the specific behaviours and situations which lead to these deaths.
This might be controversial, but we need to stop the beatification of people who are killed in some of these accidents. We've had a few accidents in recent years where several young people have been killed and the national response is to treat it like a tragedy...even though at least one was very obviously a driver being an idiot. The driver was convicted but that got a lot less coverage in the media. The exact details aren't published beyond saying he was speeding. They need detailed reports of exactly what was done and the results of it.
The quality of driving since Covid has plummeted and in general the quality of people has plummeted. People are just fucking selfish cunts now with no regard for the safety of other road users.
It’s just the attitude of people and the sheer disregard for anyone else but themselves. Even when they get called out on their shitty driving behaviour, their first instinct is to hurl abuse and blame you for their dangerous manoeuvre.
Twice I’ve had older women cut me off on the motorway and after I’ve flashed the lights at them they’ve reacted by flipping me off whilst screaming through the windscreen. I was taken aback that an older woman would react so aggressively to another driver. They don’t know who they’ve cut off, God forbid it’s some psycho with massive road rage.
And yesterday a car was in lane two overtaking another car, decided last minute they had to take an exit so jammed on in lane two before cutting across behind the car they were overtaking to take the exit at the very last second, causing me to have to brake to avoid a collision. I beeped and flashed the lights only to be stared and gestured at as if I had done something wrong.
Then not five minutes later an X5 decided the hard shoulder was its own personal traffic avoidance lane for a good 200 metres. Traffic was heavy but flowing at just under the speed limit at this point but the X5 wanted to go faster than that to only get stuck again anyway.
Rules of the road are a suggestion now, and nobody gives a toss about them or about anyone else on the road. It used to be mirror, signal, manoeuvre, now it’s just manoeuvre,signal, flip the bird.
Just allow Garda units to use modern technology to enforce the law already. Every major junction should have a red light camera, every stretch of road where an accident occurs should have a permanent speeding camera and a redesign. Everyone convicted of driving while intoxicated should have to have a breathalyser built into every future car to stop them repeating the offense and it should be an offence to drive without one after that.
If we actually care about road safety we should do these things.
We’ve one of the lowest deaths per capita in Europe and road deaths in general have dramatically decreased over a macro period. There’s of course going to be statistical variance year on year. This is a stupidly over-focused metric.
More divergent driving styles and cultures. Wrong side of the road driving wrong way down slip roads etc. Then there's drugs and speeding. Electric cars are silent and fast. Im sure there's a few right there.
It is a bunch of things - increased density, poor roads, unclear markings/signage, cars 2 with touch screens, the onward march of phones and online usage, incomplete driving instruction/testing and, (here goes) a greater number of people with driving qualifications/ experience obtained elsewhere.
the problem is everyone is not at the same speed theres always changing speeds, lets say ur dojng 80 half focused on the road thne next u have to do 60 thse new speed laws are not considtent.
going at the same speed is benefitcial in the long run! of course differnt types of roads will have differrnt type of speeds dependidng on the road but u have to conside the roads hwre its 80 now but in 2mins it could be 60.
I remember when there were far fewer cars on the road & road deaths were in the 400’s. While any amount of deaths is tragic and avoidable, in the grander scheme of things we’re not doing too badly.
A lot of roads have fallen into disrepair, particularly rurally where speed limits tend to be higher. Driving under the influence, phone use and general driver distraction seems to be the main cause of accidents.
I drive a fair bit and have seen some seriously woeful decisions being made, thankfully have never witnessed an accident or have I ever come across a fatal accident.
More bleeding lanes in rural Ireland, so people can overtake normaly.
2/1 roads french style or 2/2's.
People can say attitudes need to change but its not happening, and being stuck behind some dickhead going 50 on a 80 road or even a 100 and cant overtake creates aggression and anger.
Im not talking about tractors or other slow vehicles but people that just dont give a fuck.
Attitudes need to change? How about Garda need to do their fucking jobs? We've reports that the Road Policing Unit has not been doing anything in the past few years, and it shows.
There is no enforcement. I could drive like a massive cunt with no risk. You can drive however you like here. If the road network was improved - more dual-carriageways between major population centres, fast travel is easier and safer. There has been no real investments in major road projects that aren't either a bypass or a road to or from Dublin. We need a dual carriageway from Donegal to Limerick, Rosslare to Athlone, Mullingar to Drogheda and Castlebar, and a motorway from Dublin to Letterkenny... off the top of my head. I bet there is causality between the lack of decent fast roads in Mayo and Donegal and the disproportionate road casualties in those counties.
Aid them in changing attitudes so. Allow uber to operate so people can get safe and reliable taxis home in the countryside. Change the drug swabs so people aren’t being falsely accused of being under the influence for smoking a joint a few days ago. These would solve the “ah fuck it anyways” issues I see in the vile humans & future statistics who drive under the influence
I think there’s also something to be said about speeding. I’m not sure what else can be done to make it more taboo. I feel like everyone except me is happy about speeding. “There’s a camera in x spot” “there’s a camera there”. How can we combat that?
I believe that (almost) every year our number of road deaths have decreased every year.
Meanwhile our population has increased massively.
Using just a number without context is bad statistics. At least the percentage of road-deaths as a proportion of the number of qualified drivers with active licenses, would leave an accurate comparison.
We are never going to have zero fatalities. Human nature is to make a mistake; and either get injured and recover, or sadly, to die.
im not trying to be rude but there is no world where we have no road deaths. None. There is no utopia. At best you can reduce it in comparison to years gone by. But there are so many cars on the roads each day, interacting with each, that accidents are a given.
So many people are just throwing out what they believe is the cause without anything beyond anecdotal evidence to back their opinion.
We need studies to be conducted, proper research that leads to conclusive evidence that we can then use to develop solutions. Questions need to be asked, not assumptions made.
Probably some anonymous question polls centred around some of the suggested causes could be a good start to determine some of the underlying issues.
The number one cause of road deaths is poor roads. In the period 2006/08 there was a huge drop in road deaths at the same time as we were building over 200km of motorway per year.
I would say that the quality of driving has taken a huge dip in the last few years. Jumping lights and whatnot. Driving while impaired is a factor but there are a lot of folks willing to take that chance at lights or overtaking.
Fully agree. It means those ridiculous speed limits doesn't work. Structures built in the middle of the road don't work either. Normal road in good condition without distracting stuff is all it's needed.
I'm not talking about drivers abilities, that's a separate subject. Just wanted to point out that whatever changes are debated and then financed by our politicians doesn't make sense. There is a patch of the road in Mayo that's in relatively good condition, but it's taken down and resurfaced every few years without any visible reason. Country roads nearby are in such bad condition they should be a priority. It occurred there is a deal with council to repair that pach regularly - company doing that said repairing country roads wouldn't be profitable to them.
Probably shooting myself here as an immigrant but I am curious how many crashes involve or caused by drivers with L or N plate who have little experience of driving on Irish roads?
I have traveled with some colleagues from South Asia and their driving style scared me. Now I only use public transit. I am a licensed driver in my home country but I struggle to drive in Ireland. The pace is so fast moving and the weather conditions are also very challenging.
I would like to see number of vehicles recorded on roads v accidents when these numbers are shown . We are getting better at tracking everything. But population is growing number if people driving is growing .
What about the lad posting himself on tiktok on a motorcycle absolutely flying it through traffic. Was he arrested and charged ? If we're serious about road safety, no one would be so brazen to break the law and post himself doing it
When the guards were brought into my work to give a talk on road safety, I think they said the yearly average road traffic deaths was 173.
I don't want to sound cynical or anything, but this is only within a <10% deviation from the average. This report makes it sound like its a huge outlier year.
Mobile phone use out the wazzooo, more drivers due to higher population, bigger heavier bulky SUVs tend to roll more & cause more damage upon impact, SUVs are more likely to kill pedestrians & cyclists, shit roads, wetter climate conditions causing lots of surface water on rural roads as drains are either blocked or non existent. I doubt the majority of these road deaths are due to alcohol/drugs, yeah there are still some gobshites who do drive under influence but I’d like to see the RSA statistics.
Simple answer is not enough Gardai on the roads. You rarely see them now compared to pre covid. 2025 christmas was the firat christmas i didnt see a checkppint for drink driving let alone go through one.
How many more road users are there now? I think we are doing quite well actually given the influx of "couldn't give 2 flying fucks about your laws" people who have landed into our country.
I constantly see red lights broken, people in bus lanes, cars weaving from one lane to the other without using indicators, undertaking, speeding, not leaving enough space and people nearly hitting cyclists
No, driving test and standard over all needs to be improved. If we actually teach people how to drive instead of how to pass an easy test, it would make a big difference.
I mentioned on another post about speeding that I never understood why we make it public information where speed camera vans are going to be positioned. People will just slow down for that stretch of road then speed up once they know they're in the clear. Can anyone explain the rational?
A lot of responses saying, a good speed camera catches nobody. But just because people slow down for the van doesn't mean it's stopping people speeding the rest of the time.
There are so many crowd sourced map apps now that warn about upcoming speed vans, but it's a cat and mouse game the RSA have to play to keep drivers on their toes. There's no reason to ever speed so why not make it easier to get caught to make people more careful? I just don't understand the attitude.
The same should be done with running red lights. Cameras placed randomly at junctions to catch people. Being impatient when on the road in a very machine vehicle is just not on and we've got so complacent with it.
Obligatory shout out to massively improving public transport across the board to get people off the road and into buses, trains, trams. Too many times people are forced to drive while tired, stressed, angry out of lack of alternatives.
Came to my local light this morning, it's a protected right after a 15 seconds. Single lane. The car in front drove up on a full kerb to drive on the footpath to get by. This is at citywest hotel for anyone that knows it, security up the road in a booth and nary a Gardaí to be seen. There are loads of blind Ukrainians living in the ipas centre, as are a load of kids.
Anyways, overtook the Audi who drove on the path to get by 2 mins later on the M7, good job buddy
Laws mean nothing without enforcement. Haven't seen a garda in the area since the protests
Was travelling at 102km/h in 100 zone last summer. A Land Cruiser pulling a double axle cattle trailer came right up behind me and started flashing. Seconds later he tore out past me at about 120-130km/h and to punish me for not instantly getting out of his way, he cut back in about 50cm from my headlight. The aggressiveness, the ignorance, the speed, the idiocy was shocking.
Catching 50 people with speed van for being a small bit over the limit isn’t dealing with the real lunacy on the roads. There needs to be more unmarked cars out looking for these lunatics.
The lack of enforcement is a massive problem. But the government wont admit that, instead we're going to get further speed limit reductions and laws that will never be applied just so they can give themselves a pat on the back and say they are doing something about it.
Since lockdown and the covid restricted movement, I have seen and been stopped at exactly 1 checkpoint, and that was the halloween bankholiday weekend last year. Thats 1 checkpoint in 5 years, and ive driven more than 150,000km in that time, at all different times of the day. Ive also seen just 3 different Gardai with the speed guns.
That's one more than me, and not for a lack of driving. There's a lack of resources but I find it difficult to believe that they're so lacking that you can go years without seeing a checkpoint.
That’s 16 more than last year which is disappointing, it should be going down. There needs to be a way bigger Garda presence on the roads. I drive in France once or twice a year and the difference is stark, Police on the roads are a common sight there. I don’t remember the last time I went through a checkpoint here.
So is perspective that over 24000 people have lost their lives on Irish roads since the 1960's that is somehow acceptable because it's falling overall? Using stats in that way to try explain away the 190 lives lost on roads in 2025 doesn't make sense. Tell it to each of the families of that 190 that their loved one losing their life in 2025 was justifiable because overall the stats are falling. The RSA have done fuck-all in the last 20 years except urging & pleading. Fuck-all. Their board members are paid enormous sums of money to do nothing. The Gardai are under-resourced & disinterested in enforcing. The judges won't enforce the law when a motorist comes in front of them in court. Meanwhile the number of motorists increases & standards decrease. This Government are u-turning on 30kph limits. Some gobshite Minister is telling us "no stone will be left unturned" about this while they do nothing. Attitudes won't change because no enforcement. Selfishness is increasing across every aspect of life so attitudes won't change. Drugs rampant & a lot of motorists are coke off their heads. Even if somebody's license is revoked they are still driving & no enforcement means they get away with it.
It does. The overwhelming car dependency in Ireland at the systemic level also needs to be addressed through huge improvements in order to make public and active transport a viable alternative in both rural and urban areas.
Everyone's blaming attitudes, but infrastructure isn't helping either. Why should I be allowed to do 80 on a road that's barely wide enough for 1 car, let alone 2?
I feel the quality of driving has gone down so insanely in recent years. Like, I see daily occurrences of utter nut cases, breaking lights, pulling out in front of people, going crazy speeds. You go into car parks and so many people have abandoned trying to park straight between the lines.
It's like this horrific selfishness has crept into people. "I'm gonna do what I want, when I want, and I couldn't care less about the risks!"
I'm amazed the death stats are as low as they are with the shit I see on the roads.
In Galway; green lights mean go, orange means speed up as much as possible and red means "well another 2 or 3 can definitely push through". People on their phones meandering across the centre line and the hard shoulder, speeding, undertaking in the bus lanes, unsecure loads, all sorts of shenanigans.
Id say what's keeping our numbers down is the drop off in popularity of mopeds, less motorbikes used as daily drivers and piss poor bicycle uptake.
Not excusing people trying to sneak through the lights but Galway needs to stop allowing building of anything until it is properly bypassed. It’s horrendous. The traffic is absolutely insane.
As an increasingly infrequent visitor Galway it is a traffic hell hole and your local political representation act like hicks who cannot even imagine an alternative to a car. It's the definition of how local politics ruin this country. There is no vision, at all!
Should be a ring road around Galway, it’s not practical to have that many cars in streets built centuries ago
It's badly needed, as well as a whole heap of other things.
Id love to see some ambition in transport projects. How about everything inside of the quince pedestrianised/cycle access with a tram network and some fuck off multistorey car parks outside?
Realistically still need another bridge over the corrib, you'd be taking the old ones out of action and we've too many people that need to cross and can't be expected to go up and over the lake.
If people in Galway opted to use buses, walk or cycle, that would help.
I walked past the shopping centre last year. Long line of about 80 cars heading towards the city. Almost every car had only one person inside.
Galway is compact: the ATU campus to Salthill is only 5.4km. Doable in 19 minutes on a bike.
I agree kind of, my parents live out on the Cappagh Road, the nearest Tesco is 2 miles away….they’re too old to ride bikes etc. but yeah, I can’t understand why you would spend an hour in traffic then the hassle of parking , rather than walk…and the walks are very scenic & enjoyable
I work in the Netherlands. totally normal to see people over 70 using e-bikes for their daily errands
I looked into the stats. 2025 only has number of deaths for now. Details on the breakdown can only be done from 2024 or earlier. Don't shoot any messengers here but there has been an increase in the amount of people using e-scooters. E-bikes and even normal bikes have never been more popular. However, they are dying more too. Accelerating on orange or squeezing past a red light is not causing the increase, I can't even find one instance of that from 24. (I'm sure there were non fatal collisions) Anyway ill cut to the meat, the increase in unprotected road users and the increase of automatic cars and phone use has caused a spike in urban areas (phone plus over 50km per hour, survivability increases under 50). Remove that spike and we are trending downwards like normal since 2009
It was noticeable bad coming out of lockdown
I said it before but I truly believe COVID changed society for the worse in a way no other event in history did. People are just different now than they were in 2018. Not sure if it's politics, social media or what but there was a major worldwide shift in society in the last 5-7 years
Some studies from the onset of the pandemic suggest that COVID-19 specifically damages the Prefrontal Cortex. Would explain a lot if that was the case. One report even suggested traffic collisions were more likely to happen to people who were vaccine adverse.
At least there was a bit of an excuse then.
Was there?
"I haven't driven regularly in a while, so I should drive like a bellend"
I didn't say it was a good excuse.
You see it everywhere unfortunately, not just in driving. People ruining your cinema experience with their phones and noise, same on public transport or in any public space. Horrific selfishness indeed.
And the entitlement when called on the antisocial levels of behaviour makes things worse. Kinda have to be ready to throw a few digs now if ye even suggest someone chill out or lower their voice
You definitely do, there's a huge amount of people out there now who feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to throw down over the smallest of things
Yeah, but I nearly dismiss the cinemas and public transport as a predominantly teenager issue. In those circumstances, it's usually younger people, whereas something like driving is obviously an "adult" issue.
Mind, the shit behavior of those kids comes from somewhere....
Cinema and public transport is not a teen issue, it's an all age problem
I know it's going to be anecdotal, but as someone who goes to the cinema twice a month or so, it's been entirely a teen issue for me, personally. Genuinely never had an issue with grown ups.
Mine is anecdotal too, but I've found in the last few years middle-aged couples can also be dreadful - my guess is they spent lockdown in front of a screen inhaling comfort food without having to worry about noise.
I've had more issues with grown ups than teens (often when I tell a teen or kid to shut up they will, it's only ever adults who've attempted to assault or make a scene out of it) but again that's anecdotal
Yup. I had to ask a bloke two rows in front of me to put his iPad sized phone away during a trip to the cinema, he had it out for half the movie on high brightness. Like I couldn't concentrate on the movie screen at all because of it.
Different time had to put up with some aul wan answering phone calls and texting for some of the movie, someone else who was closer to her asked her to shut up and she walked out of the cinema to take a call. Like that wasn't the first fucking sensible thing to do if you're in the cinema. If I am watching a movie, I cancel the call and text them to say in the cinema text me. Or I leave the theatre if it's an emergency/important call.
It’s not a teen issue, I’ve seen grown adults listen to absolute rubbish on public transport while also observed grown adults looking at their phones in the cinema, so its not a “predominantly teenager issue”
It’s not. Everyone is out for themselves and fuck you if you comment on their anti social behaviour. Cinema is not your front room. Stay off your phone for an hour and shut up
Its the age of entitlement.
Only two days back, I was in the cycle lane on my scooter on a busy road. A car overtook me, then pretty much immediately afterwards (as in 20-30 metres later) started veering into the cycle lane and slowing.
I was flashing lights, ringing my bell, and shouting at them (the passenger window was open) but they just kept slowly moving in on me, I am assuming in expectation that I would just stop and allow allow them to take a break while I stood there in the cold behind them. There is literally no way they could not have seen me. As far as they were concerned "my car weighs 2,00bs and your scooter weighs less than 50... therefore I have right of way, and your cycle lane is now my personal car park."
I refused to stop for them and made things very uncomfortable, so they then just stopped outright, leaving me less than 2ft of cycle path to go by on. I roared in abuse at them through the open window, but honestly regret not kicking a massive dent in the side of their car. There is literally no other way these types of people will learn, since traffic enforcement basically doesn't exist in this country.
I'm ordering a camera for the scooter now, and next time I may just continue to carry on straight, hit into them if that's what has to happen, and get ready to make a claim.
It’s down to lack of enforcement imo. There are just not enough garda on the roads.
Or the streets. Or on public transport. Etc.
I agree with this to some extent but it's up to drivers to follow the rules too. Everyone knows them, the idea that a guard has to enforce them is ricidulous. You'd have to have so many guards at every junction and traffic lights that we'd live in a police state
We need another 250,000 gardai to police every road
Around north docks/queys there's no regard for traffic rules in the slightest.
Taxi drivers especially will break red lights without any issues. Literally a red light that's been red for 20 seconds, not even from amber to red.
Driving in Dublin is gridlock so people constantly run red lights.
We need the frequency rates of nonlethal accidents compared to lethal ones. I feel like cars have gotten safer and there's more accidents and close calls but the death rate remains relatively steady proportional because of safety efforts.
To me lack of enforcement is the number one issue. Zero consequences.
At least one car breaking red lights at speed through pedestrian crossings is guaranteed on busy roads now. It's scary because imo it's definitely more prevalent on ped only crossing than junctions, probably because there's less risk of damage to their vehicle. It's so frequent I've started to visibly do a quick fakeout putting my foot out as soon as lights are turning orange just to force cars to actually start slowing down and stopping.
I just found out yesterday in Dublin City at least, they've started increasing the time between red lights for cars and turning green for pedestrians to cross to help mitigate against this behaviour. There's a crossing on Malahide road that the lights were upgraded recently really I noticed the delay for the green man
People have lost any kind of patience, or common sense it seems
I blame the trend of having big cars with poor visibility.
Seems they're made so assholes can feel as such.
Someone ran a stop sign in front of me so I blasted the horn at them. I pulled in to park a little bit later and they started complaining to me about using the horn after they had just rolled through a Stop sign!
What I've noticed, and I wonder has anyone else noticed, because I find it bizarre, is people watching TV, YouTube, TikTok, or something like that, while driving.
Anyone else notice that?
Even on the M50 (My comment is Dublin based observations)
Lights were out at a busy cross roads this morning. Some nutter blasted through them as if he has a green light. Didn’t bother to check if anyone else was making their way through
Are "attitudes" the main cause of these road deaths?
"Attitudes" doesn't really cover what the problem is, and until that is identified and addressed, nothing is going to change.
I think using the phone is a big part of it, which ultimately is the attitude of the driver. As in, not taking the risk of distraction seriously.
I think all of the above.
I'd assume that there are common underlying attitudes to driving that inform people's engagement in three or four of your listed examples.
Probably, but "ah, lads, do better" clearly isn't cutting it as a response.
The statistics are surely there to allow the RSA, the Gardai and whatever the relevant departments are to actually address the most serious causes of this level of deaths and incidents.
I’d say phones are 90% of the issue, in the recent spike.
This is 2003 all over again. Mobile phones were around for a while, but the cost of texting collapsed around then and suddenly we had tonnes of drivers texting behind the wheel.
Right before covid, we got 4G and most carriers had data packages which enable us to stream video on our phones. Fast forward to now, I can see into the car windows outside my house all day long, easily 5% of drivers are watching streaming content on their phones while driving.
All the other stuff listed... drink/drugs is maybe on the way back a small bit. We're not more tired or less skilled drivers and the roads are better.
We had 4G and large data packs for years before COVID
The monthly fair usage amounts were doubled during COVID because of the amount of streaming people were doing, don't think that came down after
4G may have launched at the end of 2013, into 2014, but the wide coverage mixed with the ever increasing transition away from TV and into phones for watching content was all a few years after that and it would have been totally bizarre to see someone watching video on the phone back then. No one was video calling on there phones until 2017/2018.
My point is that this combined with the Netflix/Disney/apple/prime/twitch explosion meant people en masse started using their phones to watch videos or tv as a normal behaviour in Covid (I'm generally an early adopters and I'd been watching video on my phone for years, but Covid really ramped it up).
Since Covid, folks are bingeing shows or live streams to the point where I they wanna waste a 30 minute drive listening to random radio and instead, wanna keep consuming their preferred content.
So we've got car after car with drivers looking down to their left to see who shot who or what have you just as the brake lights come on ahead of them.
You're timeline is well messed up. That was all a thing before covid.
It wasn't as common as it's become. Not nearly. Back in 2017, you might have one in a couple hundred cars where someone had a lit up phone down to their left playing a video. Now, it's one in 20 or worse - I'm ten years living on the main street with traffic below where you can always see it the phone is on beside the driver.
Loads are watching vertically so I'd assume tik tok or reels, but lots are horizontally watching movies/shows/YouTube.
We've had a 10%+ population increase in a couple of years too.
More people, more cars and journeys.
If our population doubled overnight you would likely see a doubling of all road deaths also assuming all conditions remain the same
Yes a lot of drivers have come from other countries where standards are lower and they weren’t subjected to the same ads we were when we were younger.
attitudes are a handy way of the gov shifting responsibility onto the public rather than accepting lack of enforcement is probably the biggest issue
You missed the main cause, speed
100% this. Speed was the main cause of crashes 25 years ago. If you have a look at some of the more recent fatal crashes, and by the nature of the destruction, its speed. Again.
We had one of the lowest road deaths in Europe, we’ve slipped to one of the highest in a relatively short amount of time.
There’s not going to be a simple answer as to why that happened. I think the government is looking for a simple answer that they can throw money on a public awareness campaign then give themselves a pat on the back, the real answer is going to be more complicated and the Irish government is horrible at complexity.
We are nowhere near one of the highest road deaths in Europe. The stats for 2025 aren't out yet, but for 2024 we were joint 3rd lowest at a rate of 32 deaths per million. The EU average of 2024 was 45/million.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20190410STO36615/road-death-statistics-in-the-eu-infographic
The attitude is thinking they will get away with driving dangerously which is the truth. Invest in smart cameras stat.
You didn't mention people driving much larger cars, that kill more pedestrians than smaller cars in collisions at the same speed. These larger cars also have poorer visibility for a driver to see pedestrians.
The article points out the numbers driving intoxicated and those caught speeding but definitely lacks a proper statistical analysis. Conjecture and hearsay are definitely kinds of evidence though
Classic move by the government. Blame the symptom and not the cause.
A fair few of them road deaths last year were young lads showing off. How many people died on there way to beds last year 8 or 10?
Some perspective..
In the year 2000 we had 417 deaths.
In 1960 we had 302
In 2010 it was 212
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi0otHHm_yRAxXbQkEAHaVKA-kQFnoECA8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rsa.ie%2Fdocs%2Fdefault-source%2Froad-safety%2Fr2---statistics%2Froad-deaths-in-ireland-1959%2Froad-deaths-in-ireland-1959-to-2020.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2P7YfcCbxDtUlCx-Fp8k9y&opi=89978449
And our population is far higher now, I wonder how many additional drivers there are? Every death is obviously a tragedy but the roads are becoming safer per capita!
One of the safest places to drive on the planet.
This is a fact and seems to be ignored in the race to sound the most outraged - Ireland has an incredibly-low number of road deaths per capita compared to all but a handful of countries, half of whom are micro states where traffic rarely gets above 60km/h
It's also worth pointing out that the deaths on the road over the last five years will be skewed by Covid 19 lock downs between 2020 and 2022.
Yes but that’s a factor everywhere
I mean we have Vision 0, as in no road deaths.
I do believe that is possible and a very positive goal. Every death is preventable and a tragedy.
It a laudable aim certsinky but possible ?? Really ?
People die every day, climbing stairs or eating threir dinners.
Would love to see a breakdown of the stats- gender, age, intoxicated / speeding etc.
So would everyone but not a hope of the RSA releasing the actual stats.
Think an interesting stat would be length of the journey prior to the accident. People sitting in traffic for 4 hours a day 5 days a week is definitely going to have a knock on effect.
People need to get off their phones. The amount of drivers who go past who are obviously distracted and not observing the road is crazy.
I spent 20 minutes behind a guy with YouTube up on his phone attached to the windscreen while driving. He couldn't keep straight and was varying from 20 under to 20 above. Worse than a drunk person. And you know full well he'd just turn it off if stopped by gards so no way to enforce it.
Peoples brains are being rotted. Can’t do anything without a phone in their hands. But doing it while driving is disgustingly selfish
Man in his 60s too driving an old banger of a car.
Was watching a learn to drive video.
empower citizens to submit video recordings by passengers, pedestrians or dash cam which show the offence and punish it.
That being said, in the mid 2000s, when the cost of sending a text plummeted, we saw a surge in texting while driving and it led to a massive public clamdown by Gardai for anyone holding a phone while driving. It led to a real change in attitudes and a fear of getting points. It worked well enough, but now that the cost of streaming video on our phones is effectively zero, we need a fresh campaign of pressure to make it wholly unacceptable socially and create a fear that you can easily be caught. IT's absolutely solvable as a problem.
It's easy enough to enforce it if they were actually bothered. Put out one Garda on their existing Garda mountain bike with their existing Garda bodycam and they'll have hard evidence of loads of drivers using their phones on each shift. It's illegal to even have a phone on your lap, just waiting to distract you.
They could do this tomorrow if they changed their own "h'attitudes" but they won't.
None of these articles trying to ascribe blame ever list the increase in population as a factor. More people=more cars=more deaths.
If anything the roads are getting safer than they used to be, eg
2014- 1.9m cars on Irish roads, 193 total deaths
2024- 2.47 million cars on Irish roads 171 deaths
So in a decade we now have 30% more cars on the roads but that didnt resulted in 30% more deaths but a 12% increase.
Road deaths are never going to be zero so given that there are now 600,000 more cars on the roads in 10 years we're actually doing okay.
This is a shite take and the “attitude that needs to change”
New Jersey and Helsinki have gone entire years without road deaths after lowering speed limits and redesigning junctions, yes these are cities but it’s not impossible
As does enforcement
Or lack of it
https://preview.redd.it/tunxmnap85cg1.png?width=630&format=png&auto=webp&s=6e29042bd98209c6cf444741250d14e267b4c5a8
We would appear to be doing very well. Any attempt to change attitudes should be approached cautiously.
Government and Garda attitudes need to change, they are the ones who can change the public’s behaviour.
Jesus fucking Christ it’s exhausting hearing them constantly pawn off the blame as if they are powerless.
I think we've reached maximum saturation of people who will be affected by pleads of morality/humanity... anyone who will be affected by these ads and these calls to consider how they drive will have by now done so.
We now need enforcement and visibility. Cameras, guards, the whole lot.
Oh come on! Road safety is the responsibility of every road user.
And if someone causes an accident through their own negligence or carelessness, then they certainly are to blame, not the government or the Guards.
Agreed, the people are the problem. But the public will simply not improve unless forced to.
Yes and no.
People are lazy and form habits, often in line with the path of least resistance. If they start out the perfect driver, but theres no enforcement, habits and bad behaviour creep in over time as there is no consequences.
You are depending on the Gardai to enforce basic rules, or at least be visible and make it feel like drivers bad behaviour is being watched. otherwise its going to keep sliding to the lowest level that will still get them to where they want to go.
I'd love if this wasnt the case, but when youre dealing with people, this is how it is.
No it's all the kids that can't drive fault, because they didn't dress themselves in neon bubble wrap and wear flashing signs in the middle of the day. The driver would never have speeded or broke the lights if it wasn't for how the kids dressed.
And what about drivers - are they powerless?
Ultimately drivers have a significant responsibility in this too - not all on the government or guards to hold our hands while we're driving.
Agreed, the people are the problem. But the public will simply not improve unless forced to.
There's plenty of good drivers just the problem is theres enough of a minority of childish sheeple all with the attitude that it's almost somebody else's fault ... "I broke the law because I saw somebody else did it first.." that's an excuse my 6 year old nephew uses not a grown adult!
I think it's down to each person's individual responsibility to adhere to the driving laws & best practice on our roads.
But yes, the people who decide that they don't have to adhere to these laws etc. are not going to change on their own. This is where better enforcement needs to come in. And even still, lots whinge & moan when they're caught breaking the laws.
I did notice that recent Garda road safety statements are thankfully becoming a bit more direct, instead of the previous only asking politely that people 'take care' and 'behave' on the roads. The volume of death and carnage on our roads really does require that the messaging becomes harsher & more explicit.
Personally, I also think that a campaign focusing on reporting people you know who are driving drunk etc. is way overdue. Too often people are expected to tackle these inebriated people themselves & it very often goes badly for a number of reasons (violence, power imbalance etc.), this is where the Gardaí could really make an impact that's absolutely within their remit.
Ultimately the responsibility is on the drivers.
That's the biggest load of bollocks I've heard today, well done! Honestly, blame the person driving; we're all adults who know the rules and have supposed to sat driving tests etc. Take some fucking responsibilty; they're not the ones making people be on their phones
I live in a rural area and the amount of houses built on small back roads is kinda insane, also all those houses have 2-4 cars depending on the amount of people living in the house. Same in housing estates. Various government and lots of local authorities have built a car centric towns and cities. All towns and cities have so much traffic.
Dismissing it as attitudes need to change is just words that are just offloading responsibility for the issue.
I also think we should blame the very poor design and maintenance of roads. There are some terribly designed junctions. There was one on my driving test in Navan that was actually dangerous.
Also the reduction of speeds on L roads from 80-50 km/h was beyond pointless and actually damaging. They needed a new classification of road or a lot of upgrades to the L roads BEFORE introducing the speed limit change. My rural road is L, decent road, plenty wide and maintained well and the small roads off it that are not wide enough for 2 cars. They are classified as the same.
Things need to change across the board and not just on the drivers side.
In the 1970's there was the equivalent of 5k to 6k road deaths per year when adjusting for cars on the road. It's incredibly safe today in comparison. We're also one of the top 10 countries in the world for road safety.
I'll probably be down voted here but so long as cars are driven by humans, and are subject to human error and misjudgement (including driving a car while under the influence of an intoxicant) then there will always be road deaths.
There are states in America that go years without even having an accident free day.
I don't mean to be an apologist for idiotic driving or even intoxicated driving but road fatalities will always be a particularly brutal and harrowing reality of life.
Yet driving has never been as objectively safer. Cars are fitted with all kinds of hardware and software to keep us safe, if I drift even a tiny bit out of the centre of a lane, my steering wheel automatically corrects it. I have a radar on the front of my car which sets the distance I can keep from the car in front of me. For this, we can at least be thankful.
How much has the population increased in the last 8-10 years since the low point? That alone probably accounts for the increase not to mentiont the amount of dreadful non EU drivers we have.
Its up about 900,000 people
We have somewhere around 3 million vehicles in the country. Average private vehicle does ~15k km per year. So that's 45,000 million km travelled across the fleet. Lets not act like it's the wild west
Per RSA data every year there's about ~49,000 collisions. Of those, ~43000 are material damage only. 5500 have some form of injury, and obviously the remainder make up the <200 deaths.
We're already among the safest countries in the EU for road safety. The only countries with lower numbers are Sweden and Denmark. The EU average for road deaths per million inhabitants is 45. Ireland had 32.
Most of the bad behaviour comes from white Irish people.
Im white Irish.
Source ?
For what
You said most of the bad behaviour comes from white Irish people you got a source for that statement or did you whip it out ur arse?
Observation.
Whereabouts are ye from?
Need to open your eyes a bit then
He's technically not wrong as white Irish make up the overwhelming majority of the Irish population it'd be expected that the statistics reflect this.
All of the problems in this country and somehow this gets so much attention. There are roughly 6 or 7 countries in the entire world with safer roads (excluding microstates). The government are happy to keep the focus on the roads while the state decays in every other department
It's an over focused metric which the media like to use as a society rating. Everything is relative & we must accept some risk. There are 500 suicides per year in Ireland yet that never receives the same level of attention. Almost 100 people die everyday in this country, so 2 days worth of all deaths per year come from the roads.
Suicide death is much more complex and less preventable
It's actually a very small number in terms of our population of approx 5.4M: 0.000035%
Especially considering how poorly our roads are policed.
Yeah it's a good example of misleading statistics. And Ireland has a huge amount of licensed drivers. Like the most per capita outside of malta.
This isn't forgiving nor saying nothing can be done. Other countries reduced their deaths. There are commonalities with our accidents we can solve for.
Ireland is one of the safest countries for road deaths. We were better, and have slipped a little, but overall it is still towards the safest in Europe (which is safest in the world).
Yeah looking at the stats, we haven't had over 200 deaths since 2010. People forget we've come along way from the 400+ during the 90s and 300+ during the 00s. I imagine a lot of that has to do with car safety standards though.
The reason for that has more to do with the fact that we rolled out our N and M roads later, and so they're better designed. Most of our deaths as a result occur in rural roads.
in canada we average about 2k deaths a year on 45 mil so its pretty close.
but then again we get lots of snow. Yesterday at a Mcdonalds drive thru the person in front of me side and rear windows were completely covered in snow so he had no visibility other than the front windshield.
people are just dumb.
Yes population has increased, but so has public transport usage and availability. Population isn't the figure you need to look at rather total Kms driven across the country. We should look at these statistics normalised for km driven not population
You're right, deaths per KMs driven would be a much more useful statistic. Maybe NCT centers would have the KMs data.
Still, I was just pointing out (without being insensitive to those who have lost loved ones on the roads) that 190 road deaths in a country with our population actually isn't terrible, IMO. Obviously, zero road deaths would be much better.
The data is already available and widely used. The reason for alarm is that the person km death rate was decreasing steadily until 2018. Since then it has shot up rapidly and is now 30% greater now. So today you're 30% more likely to die driving then you were in 2018.
A quick prompt to Chat GPT gives back the same figures you quoted. That's interesting
I'd take a wild guess and say a good portion of that increase can be attributed to mobile phone use while driving.
Here's my source, https://www.ceicdata.com/en/ireland/road-traffic-and-road-accident-fatalities-oecd-member-annual/ie-road-fatalities-per-one-million-vehiclekm
I don't think mobile phone usage can be attributed directly as I don't see any evidence for that.
How would this data be available? Where are they getting it from exactly?
The RSA does a yearly report. It's available on the CSO. I'd imagine it's an amalgamation of insurer, NCT and register data.
Also prior to electric cars fuel sales was a good proxy to this.
https://data.cso.ie/
Let's reduce the speed limit by another 10kmh per hour. That will surely stop those boyracers, phone users, and drunk drivers.
It will definitely not arbitrarily punish good responsible drivers who follow the rules and it won't result in more cars being on the road either!
People getting killed off e scooters are gonna bump the numbers.
Correlate and Causate. Then explain.
I don't understand the outrage. The numbers are way down, and what's the percentage of this compared to the population of Ireland. We don't need more pointless regulation, which is where this will probably go.
Expecting or asking for common sense from people in moments like this is useless, more enforcement and tougher sentences with effective measures for drivers constantly breaking the rules are the best way. How many times do we see eejits still being caught by Garda after dozens of similar offences?
No amount of legislation, campaigning, public awareness, etc, will get away from the fact that most people are just thick.
Start fining them, that is the only thing that changes peoples behaviour
Last week I drove through three small towns after it got dark.
On four separate occasions, lads dressed head to toe in black ran across the road directly in front of me. No warning, no traffic lights, just full steam straight out, right in front of me. This happens semi-regularly when I'm driving through small towns, I dunno what the fuck.
Regular occurrence in Dublin, except they're usually on scooters or motorbikes
RSA steadfastly refuse to publish details or make reports on WHY accidents happen.
We just get "speed kills", "don't drink and drive", which people ignore. People need to know the specific behaviours and situations which lead to these deaths.
This might be controversial, but we need to stop the beatification of people who are killed in some of these accidents. We've had a few accidents in recent years where several young people have been killed and the national response is to treat it like a tragedy...even though at least one was very obviously a driver being an idiot. The driver was convicted but that got a lot less coverage in the media. The exact details aren't published beyond saying he was speeding. They need detailed reports of exactly what was done and the results of it.
More people in the country so the numbers have gone up
Also some of those single vehicle collisions are suicides and nobody can stop that sadly
The quality of driving since Covid has plummeted and in general the quality of people has plummeted. People are just fucking selfish cunts now with no regard for the safety of other road users.
It’s just the attitude of people and the sheer disregard for anyone else but themselves. Even when they get called out on their shitty driving behaviour, their first instinct is to hurl abuse and blame you for their dangerous manoeuvre.
Twice I’ve had older women cut me off on the motorway and after I’ve flashed the lights at them they’ve reacted by flipping me off whilst screaming through the windscreen. I was taken aback that an older woman would react so aggressively to another driver. They don’t know who they’ve cut off, God forbid it’s some psycho with massive road rage.
And yesterday a car was in lane two overtaking another car, decided last minute they had to take an exit so jammed on in lane two before cutting across behind the car they were overtaking to take the exit at the very last second, causing me to have to brake to avoid a collision. I beeped and flashed the lights only to be stared and gestured at as if I had done something wrong.
Then not five minutes later an X5 decided the hard shoulder was its own personal traffic avoidance lane for a good 200 metres. Traffic was heavy but flowing at just under the speed limit at this point but the X5 wanted to go faster than that to only get stuck again anyway.
Rules of the road are a suggestion now, and nobody gives a toss about them or about anyone else on the road. It used to be mirror, signal, manoeuvre, now it’s just manoeuvre,signal, flip the bird.
A lot of pricks don't want to accept accountability. Everyone else's fault. Need a good clattering that their parents never gave them.
Just allow Garda units to use modern technology to enforce the law already. Every major junction should have a red light camera, every stretch of road where an accident occurs should have a permanent speeding camera and a redesign. Everyone convicted of driving while intoxicated should have to have a breathalyser built into every future car to stop them repeating the offense and it should be an offence to drive without one after that. If we actually care about road safety we should do these things.
We’ve one of the lowest deaths per capita in Europe and road deaths in general have dramatically decreased over a macro period. There’s of course going to be statistical variance year on year. This is a stupidly over-focused metric.
Better tittle...
'Garda traffic enforcement need to change’ after 190 people die on Irish roads in one year
More divergent driving styles and cultures. Wrong side of the road driving wrong way down slip roads etc. Then there's drugs and speeding. Electric cars are silent and fast. Im sure there's a few right there.
Is there nothing to be said for another high vis campaign run by the RSA?? Surely if everyone had one all our problems would disappear!
It is a bunch of things - increased density, poor roads, unclear markings/signage, cars 2 with touch screens, the onward march of phones and online usage, incomplete driving instruction/testing and, (here goes) a greater number of people with driving qualifications/ experience obtained elsewhere.
the problem is everyone is not at the same speed theres always changing speeds, lets say ur dojng 80 half focused on the road thne next u have to do 60 thse new speed laws are not considtent.
going at the same speed is benefitcial in the long run! of course differnt types of roads will have differrnt type of speeds dependidng on the road but u have to conside the roads hwre its 80 now but in 2mins it could be 60.
Attitudes don't need to change. The Gardai need to change. If they don't have the resources then it needs to be given to them.
In Cork, I've been through 1 checkpoint since Covid. Couldn't tell you the last time I saw a Garda speed check.
Where are the resources they had during covid? 2/3 checkpoints a day wasn't unusual for me, now none since covid.
If you see a yield sign at a roundabout what do you do?..... that's right speed up and don't slow down for the pedestrians
I remember when there were far fewer cars on the road & road deaths were in the 400’s. While any amount of deaths is tragic and avoidable, in the grander scheme of things we’re not doing too badly.
A lot of roads have fallen into disrepair, particularly rurally where speed limits tend to be higher. Driving under the influence, phone use and general driver distraction seems to be the main cause of accidents.
I drive a fair bit and have seen some seriously woeful decisions being made, thankfully have never witnessed an accident or have I ever come across a fatal accident.
More bleeding lanes in rural Ireland, so people can overtake normaly.
2/1 roads french style or 2/2's.
People can say attitudes need to change but its not happening, and being stuck behind some dickhead going 50 on a 80 road or even a 100 and cant overtake creates aggression and anger.
Im not talking about tractors or other slow vehicles but people that just dont give a fuck.
Attitudes need to change? How about Garda need to do their fucking jobs? We've reports that the Road Policing Unit has not been doing anything in the past few years, and it shows.
There is no enforcement. I could drive like a massive cunt with no risk. You can drive however you like here. If the road network was improved - more dual-carriageways between major population centres, fast travel is easier and safer. There has been no real investments in major road projects that aren't either a bypass or a road to or from Dublin. We need a dual carriageway from Donegal to Limerick, Rosslare to Athlone, Mullingar to Drogheda and Castlebar, and a motorway from Dublin to Letterkenny... off the top of my head. I bet there is causality between the lack of decent fast roads in Mayo and Donegal and the disproportionate road casualties in those counties.
Aid them in changing attitudes so. Allow uber to operate so people can get safe and reliable taxis home in the countryside. Change the drug swabs so people aren’t being falsely accused of being under the influence for smoking a joint a few days ago. These would solve the “ah fuck it anyways” issues I see in the vile humans & future statistics who drive under the influence
I think there’s also something to be said about speeding. I’m not sure what else can be done to make it more taboo. I feel like everyone except me is happy about speeding. “There’s a camera in x spot” “there’s a camera there”. How can we combat that?
I believe that (almost) every year our number of road deaths have decreased every year.
Meanwhile our population has increased massively.
Using just a number without context is bad statistics. At least the percentage of road-deaths as a proportion of the number of qualified drivers with active licenses, would leave an accurate comparison.
We are never going to have zero fatalities. Human nature is to make a mistake; and either get injured and recover, or sadly, to die.
im not trying to be rude but there is no world where we have no road deaths. None. There is no utopia. At best you can reduce it in comparison to years gone by. But there are so many cars on the roads each day, interacting with each, that accidents are a given.
But as nothing has changed in the last 30 years I'd keep your expectations low.
So many people are just throwing out what they believe is the cause without anything beyond anecdotal evidence to back their opinion.
We need studies to be conducted, proper research that leads to conclusive evidence that we can then use to develop solutions. Questions need to be asked, not assumptions made.
Probably some anonymous question polls centred around some of the suggested causes could be a good start to determine some of the underlying issues.
The number one cause of road deaths is poor roads. In the period 2006/08 there was a huge drop in road deaths at the same time as we were building over 200km of motorway per year.
I would say that the quality of driving has taken a huge dip in the last few years. Jumping lights and whatnot. Driving while impaired is a factor but there are a lot of folks willing to take that chance at lights or overtaking.
In the 1990s, it was always over 400 so that would suggest attitudes have changed.
There's always going to be noise on that graph but over longer timeframe roads are getting safer
Fully agree. It means those ridiculous speed limits doesn't work. Structures built in the middle of the road don't work either. Normal road in good condition without distracting stuff is all it's needed.
I'm not talking about drivers abilities, that's a separate subject. Just wanted to point out that whatever changes are debated and then financed by our politicians doesn't make sense. There is a patch of the road in Mayo that's in relatively good condition, but it's taken down and resurfaced every few years without any visible reason. Country roads nearby are in such bad condition they should be a priority. It occurred there is a deal with council to repair that pach regularly - company doing that said repairing country roads wouldn't be profitable to them.
Probably shooting myself here as an immigrant but I am curious how many crashes involve or caused by drivers with L or N plate who have little experience of driving on Irish roads? I have traveled with some colleagues from South Asia and their driving style scared me. Now I only use public transit. I am a licensed driver in my home country but I struggle to drive in Ireland. The pace is so fast moving and the weather conditions are also very challenging.
I would like to see number of vehicles recorded on roads v accidents when these numbers are shown . We are getting better at tracking everything. But population is growing number if people driving is growing .
What about the lad posting himself on tiktok on a motorcycle absolutely flying it through traffic. Was he arrested and charged ? If we're serious about road safety, no one would be so brazen to break the law and post himself doing it
When the guards were brought into my work to give a talk on road safety, I think they said the yearly average road traffic deaths was 173.
I don't want to sound cynical or anything, but this is only within a <10% deviation from the average. This report makes it sound like its a huge outlier year.
Mobile phone use out the wazzooo, more drivers due to higher population, bigger heavier bulky SUVs tend to roll more & cause more damage upon impact, SUVs are more likely to kill pedestrians & cyclists, shit roads, wetter climate conditions causing lots of surface water on rural roads as drains are either blocked or non existent. I doubt the majority of these road deaths are due to alcohol/drugs, yeah there are still some gobshites who do drive under influence but I’d like to see the RSA statistics.
Get off the fucking phones
Simple answer is not enough Gardai on the roads. You rarely see them now compared to pre covid. 2025 christmas was the firat christmas i didnt see a checkppint for drink driving let alone go through one.
How many more road users are there now? I think we are doing quite well actually given the influx of "couldn't give 2 flying fucks about your laws" people who have landed into our country.
I constantly see red lights broken, people in bus lanes, cars weaving from one lane to the other without using indicators, undertaking, speeding, not leaving enough space and people nearly hitting cyclists
Mostly all from certain brands of cars
No, driving test and standard over all needs to be improved. If we actually teach people how to drive instead of how to pass an easy test, it would make a big difference.
It's drugs. Cocaine is rampant.
Also post covid people have kinda gone crazy a small bit.
Not sure about attitudes. But maybe building more reliable public transit could help.
I mentioned on another post about speeding that I never understood why we make it public information where speed camera vans are going to be positioned. People will just slow down for that stretch of road then speed up once they know they're in the clear. Can anyone explain the rational?
A lot of responses saying, a good speed camera catches nobody. But just because people slow down for the van doesn't mean it's stopping people speeding the rest of the time.
There are so many crowd sourced map apps now that warn about upcoming speed vans, but it's a cat and mouse game the RSA have to play to keep drivers on their toes. There's no reason to ever speed so why not make it easier to get caught to make people more careful? I just don't understand the attitude.
The same should be done with running red lights. Cameras placed randomly at junctions to catch people. Being impatient when on the road in a very machine vehicle is just not on and we've got so complacent with it.
Obligatory shout out to massively improving public transport across the board to get people off the road and into buses, trains, trams. Too many times people are forced to drive while tired, stressed, angry out of lack of alternatives.
Came to my local light this morning, it's a protected right after a 15 seconds. Single lane. The car in front drove up on a full kerb to drive on the footpath to get by. This is at citywest hotel for anyone that knows it, security up the road in a booth and nary a Gardaí to be seen. There are loads of blind Ukrainians living in the ipas centre, as are a load of kids.
Anyways, overtook the Audi who drove on the path to get by 2 mins later on the M7, good job buddy
Laws mean nothing without enforcement. Haven't seen a garda in the area since the protests
Was travelling at 102km/h in 100 zone last summer. A Land Cruiser pulling a double axle cattle trailer came right up behind me and started flashing. Seconds later he tore out past me at about 120-130km/h and to punish me for not instantly getting out of his way, he cut back in about 50cm from my headlight. The aggressiveness, the ignorance, the speed, the idiocy was shocking. Catching 50 people with speed van for being a small bit over the limit isn’t dealing with the real lunacy on the roads. There needs to be more unmarked cars out looking for these lunatics.
Nothing will change unless the rules are enforced and as enforcing the rules costs money, nothing will be done
The lack of enforcement is a massive problem. But the government wont admit that, instead we're going to get further speed limit reductions and laws that will never be applied just so they can give themselves a pat on the back and say they are doing something about it.
Since lockdown and the covid restricted movement, I have seen and been stopped at exactly 1 checkpoint, and that was the halloween bankholiday weekend last year. Thats 1 checkpoint in 5 years, and ive driven more than 150,000km in that time, at all different times of the day. Ive also seen just 3 different Gardai with the speed guns.
How is that adequate enforcement?
That's one more than me, and not for a lack of driving. There's a lack of resources but I find it difficult to believe that they're so lacking that you can go years without seeing a checkpoint.
That’s 16 more than last year which is disappointing, it should be going down. There needs to be a way bigger Garda presence on the roads. I drive in France once or twice a year and the difference is stark, Police on the roads are a common sight there. I don’t remember the last time I went through a checkpoint here.
So is perspective that over 24000 people have lost their lives on Irish roads since the 1960's that is somehow acceptable because it's falling overall? Using stats in that way to try explain away the 190 lives lost on roads in 2025 doesn't make sense. Tell it to each of the families of that 190 that their loved one losing their life in 2025 was justifiable because overall the stats are falling. The RSA have done fuck-all in the last 20 years except urging & pleading. Fuck-all. Their board members are paid enormous sums of money to do nothing. The Gardai are under-resourced & disinterested in enforcing. The judges won't enforce the law when a motorist comes in front of them in court. Meanwhile the number of motorists increases & standards decrease. This Government are u-turning on 30kph limits. Some gobshite Minister is telling us "no stone will be left unturned" about this while they do nothing. Attitudes won't change because no enforcement. Selfishness is increasing across every aspect of life so attitudes won't change. Drugs rampant & a lot of motorists are coke off their heads. Even if somebody's license is revoked they are still driving & no enforcement means they get away with it.
It does. The overwhelming car dependency in Ireland at the systemic level also needs to be addressed through huge improvements in order to make public and active transport a viable alternative in both rural and urban areas.
Everyone's blaming attitudes, but infrastructure isn't helping either. Why should I be allowed to do 80 on a road that's barely wide enough for 1 car, let alone 2?