Road Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-30 ============================================================ Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel Tá fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I too am a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport. As my two colleagues outlined, we have had many meetings in this regard. I counted 11 such meetings. A huge emphasis has been placed on this. To be honest, the Minister of State has appeared before the committee a good few times more than most, and we are all grateful for that. The committee has heard from union and road haulage representatives, rehabilitation and victim advocacy groups and PARC. The list goes on. These meetings encompassed vulnerable road users, cyclists and those who suffer an acquired brain injury. While there were improvements in road safety in the past few decades, it is disappointing that the situation is not getting any better. I will focus on the statistics around young men. I raised this issue at the last committee meeting. Nine out of ten deaths involving speeding were male, as were nine out of ten deaths where no seatbelts were worn. A total of 87% detected under the influence were men and 74% of those detected speeding were also men. A total of 75% of those caught using a mobile phone were male. It is not about being anti-man by any stretch of the imagination but we must ask whether we are meeting young male drivers where their needs are. Are we meeting them in the communities? I spoke to witnesses from the RSA last week about the delivery of training programmes and whether we are meeting these cohorts of men in the areas we need to be. It is all very well having programmes for transition year, but a lot of people do not do transition year. A lot of people leave school before that or skip that year. Should we be looking more at youth centres, youth groups, community training centres and Youthreach? Should we focus our attention on these areas in order to target and education young men and look at where they are at in their own lives? It is not about pointing the finger but, rather, looking at where they are in their lives. Risk-taking behaviour, such as the driving up and down motorways we seen, is horrific for everyone involved, both for the families of the victims and the families of the young people involved. Support needs to be put in place in this regard. We must look at the young people involved in accidents of this nature. Were there early intervention programmes in the house? Had they been involved in juvenile liaison programmes? Did they get the supports they needed as children and young people? The Garda deputy commissioner was before the transport committee this morning on the issue of roads policing. I asked whether there were enough police driving instructors within the force and if they were going to go to Templemore. I received information that three instructors were trained but subsequently told that there were no vacancies in Templemore. We know that there are not enough Garda police units. We hear how An Garda Síochána wants the roads policing units to operate to their full capacity. However, we have three individuals who are trained and find themselves stuck. They want to go down to Templemore as instructors. That is a question that has to be asked. I asked the witnesses from An Garda Síochána to come back to me in that regard. I asked the Minister of State a number of months ago whether there should be a commissioner for road safety. He expressed confidence in the RSA, and it is good to see that he is still as confident because I know he has put a lot of work into this. There are small things like that around vulnerable road users. It is great to hear Senator Noonan talk about cycling in Dublin. As a member of the Sligo Cycling Campaign, I agree that 30 km/h zones should be mandated in our urban, built-up zones because then people would be free. It would help disabled people, cyclists and pedestrians alike. I still argue - I should be the Minister of State’s agent for the western rail corridor – that the ultimate way to address road safety is to take more people off the road, particularly trucks, freight and passengers. There is an early morning commuter train that we are pushing hard to get. Hopefully, the Minister of State can have some influence on this. It is from Longford to Sligo in the morning. It would take so much traffic off the road in the morning, including those attending Atlantic Technological University, ATU. The earliest train that arrives in Sligo is at 10.15 a.m. and it is a university town. We have a hospital and we have civil servants. It is a big and growing regional centre. The Minister of State knows this himself from being a west of Ireland man. There is a reduction in freight licensing, and in the context of an expansion of rail freight services and the western rail corridor, will the Minister of State please talk some sense into his three coalition colleagues about the greenway in Sligo, if he has any sway there at all? I live just beside Sligo Port in Sligo Bay. I see that timber that has been harvested from all around the area is being brought by truck to Sligo Bay. The western rail corridor could easily connect that up, and it could go the whole way down to Foynes, so that we would have a full system where a lot of freight and trucks would be taken off the roads, particularly on our regional roads where we do not have the infrastructure. We are also looking at offshore wind and developing that. Rail will play a really important role in that. I know we are talking about road safety but the better the availability of public transport, the more people who will come off the road, such as vulnerable road users. Local Link is another aspect and they are all connected. Since I was elected as a Senator, a number of people who live in rural areas of Sligo and Leitrim have come to me about having extra Local Link services. A lot of older and disabled people use Local Link and they are taking them off the road as well. --- 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