Road Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-30 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Minister of State. As a member of the Joint Committee on Transport, I am delighted to have this debate. As my colleague across the floor said, we have had months of engagement. What I took out of a lot of that was that this does not fall under the remit of one Department or organisation. Road safety is everything. It includes the RSA, TII, An Garda Síochána, the Department of Transport and the Minister of State's Department. Everybody needs to work together. I have to include local councils, which have a part to play when it comes to road safety. My biggest message today would be that if we want to tackle road safety, we have to start by tackling the roads. I understand 85% of accidents and road fatalities happen on rural and local roads. We have a serious issue with our roads and I do not mean national roads and motorways. Between the N69 and the road through Adare, every single year something is going on at the exact same time, which means there are roadworks on both roads leaving Limerick towards Kerry. Local roads are not getting the attention they need. There are roads in County Limerick which have not been resurfaced in the past 30 years. I requested the resurfacing of roads and was told that they are in the 2026 or 2027 plan. Potholes are being refilled, but when the harsh weather comes in they reopen. Outside of the damage potholes do to cars, people swerve to avoid them. They are on dark, small country roads. People who swerve around a pothole near a bend could meet someone coming around the bend towards them. There is big machinery on the roads. Another issue on rural roads is hedge cutting. It needs to be more regular. The hedge cutting that is done at the moment is done to suit the height of a car. Buses, tractors and trucks have to go over white lines because they fear damaging their mirrors. The cost of a mirror for a truck, tractor or bus is a hell of a lot more than for a car. They are looking after their vehicles and have to go over the white line, which is another safety issue. We cannot mitigate every single thing that could happen on a road, especially if somebody is going out to deliberately cause dangerous situations, as has happened on motorways. No matter how many messages we put out or alerts in cars or on phones, if people are going out to deliberately cause harm they will not change unless we get to them in school and educate them. We all know that early intervention in all walks of life is best, whether that is road safety, health or justice. Early intervention is key and that is what we need to do. I am delighted that there are fixed penalty notices for e-scooters, but without Garda enforcement this will continue to be a problem. We do not have enough gardaí. I know the Minister of State is trying his best to get them, but we need to speak to gardaí who are retiring and leaving and find out why. I met a garda in County Limerick a couple of weeks ago who said he is eligible to retire at Christmas and by God he is going. He said he could not stay in the organisation any longer. He did not go into detail as to why, but he was quite disgruntled. We have a serious morale issue. If we could fix that, we could get more gardaí on the books and have more of a supply to go onto our roads. I drive plenty, mainly around Limerick and up and down to Clare and Tipperary. I have not seen a Garda checkpoint since Covid. That was the last time I was stopped by the Garda, and I am on national and rural roads. I know we do not have enough gardaí to put on to rural roads - there are thousands of roads to man. On our main roads when it comes to bank holidays we hear on the radio that there will be a massive campaign and gardaí will catch people and be out in force, but I have not been stopped over the past four or five years. The last time I was stopped by gardaí was when there were checks during Covid, and that was to ask me where I was going. It was not to take a breathalyser test or check anything with the car. The NCT is a bugbear of mine. I completely agree with an NCT. My NCT was out this week and when I went to book a test a couple of weeks ago, the closest date I could get was the first week of December in Limerick. It is not an issue that the test is so far away, but when I get a test in December it will be backdated, meaning I will lose a couple of months. My car will have been deemed roadworthy for the past three months, but I will still have to come back in nine months' time and pay again. It is a little bit of a money thing when it comes to the NCT. It should not be able to say that a car has been roadworthy for the past three or six months when it does not know whether that was the case. Also, a person should not have to lose three months on the other end and have to go back to pay it again as a result of that. I heard mention of high-visibility jackets across the floor. I definitely agree with them. Often, I drive on country and rural roads. Some people wear all black clothing. Even during the day, if the sun is at a certain height, it is nearly impossible to see such people. There is a need for education in this regard. There is also the issue of e-scooters and cycling. I do not see this too often in Limerick because I am based in County Limerick rather than Limerick city. However, in Dublin, I see this issue. I am not afraid of the cars, trucks or buses in Dublin. Rather, I am afraid of crossing the road when there is a cyclist coming because they do not stop at the traffic lights. Everyone has a part to pay, as I said earlier. We have the RSA and other organisations, but every road user has a part to play. Everyone must obey the rules of the road as they pertain to them and respect everybody else on the road. Everyone should walk a day in everyone else’s shoes. I noticed this when my daughter started driving. When my children were pedestrians, they kept their heads down and were looking at their phones when walking across roads. To them, as they were at a pedestrian crossing, they had the right of way. They did not check to see whether a car was coming because it was a pedestrian crossing and they had the right of way. By God, since getting into their cars and realising how hard it is to see every single thing around them when they are driving and how much there is to concentrate on, they do not do that any more. Now, when they are walking or see someone coming out onto the road, they hope those individuals look up. There is a need for education across the board for every road user, whether they are walking, cycling or driving. There is a lot to be done in this regard. I would like to see more investment and funding for councils to look after rural roads in order to stop the high incidence rate of accidents. These accidents may not all be fatal. We see the statistics on fatal accidents but there are also accidents that leave people with acquired brain injuries. I have met a lot of residents and people near me who have had accidents and are left with life-debilitating conditions. Those people have a whole life to live in which they must try to access services, which are quite difficult to access. Their entire families, who have to look after them, are put under stress and strain. We need to be looking at everything in the round. --- 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/seanad/2026-09-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-30