Road Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-30 ============================================================ Seán Canney (IND), Galway East I will start at the end and work my way back. The issue Senator Conway raised is being discussed in the EU. Nothing has been signed. It is within my remit at the moment in the EU Presidency. It is one of the files that is being discussed and no conclusion has been reached on it yet. Negotiations are going on, I hear what the Senator is saying, and I thank him for that. I will go back to a few things that were said by different Senators. I compliment them. I know they are completely committed to saving lives. In Europe in 2025, we lost nearly 20,000 people to road fatalities. That is a pandemic in any person's language. That is what we are facing. We are, as a nation within the European Union, doing okay, but we are not doing okay because people are dying. That is the bottom line. On the issue of substances, if Senator Costello sends me something on that, I will bring it up with my officials. I think it was well put forward by the Senator and we need to look at it to see what we can do with it. Education and what is happening with young people came up. The Road Safety Authority is responsible for the roll-out of a national post primary schools offering which is training teachers to become professional learning people who can teach road safety within the schools. This year, we intend to have that programme delivered to all 730 post-primary schools. It is vital we get it out there. Someone mentioned that 80% of our road network is local roads. It is 94% of the length and it is used by 55% of our traffic. We have reduced the speed limit from 80 km/h to 60 km/h on these roads. These are the roads that need attention to their junctions and whatever else. The low-cost access schemes exist and I encourage all the local authorities to put them together. They will have more access to data from once the National Vehicle and Driver File, Road Traffic and Roads Bill goes through. At the moment, it is daft that the local authorities are not allowed to access the information that the RSA or the Garda have about collisions. That will help them and it will become more workable for the local authorities. They do not have to look for stuff because it is there for them and they can take it out, as it were. I commend the local authorities on all the works they have done on low-cost accident schemes over the years. They have done a lot but there is much more to do and they need more assistance. Senator Clonan spoke about education and it was well put. I would love to see another couple of thousand gardaí on the roads every day. The reality is that we are building capacity to turn out 1,000 new gardaí every year. That is where it is coming to by the end of this year. For me, while we are waiting for that, and that is not something you can magic up overnight, we need to be smart and to use the technologies we have. These intermittent speed cameras, the fixed-point cameras, the technologies that the Garda has and the legislation I am bringing forward will help the force to work more efficiently. Even with the speed vans, at the moment, the inspector of the speed van has to appear in court if somebody challenges the speed fixed notice they have got. When this legislation passes, it will mean that a certification will do in court. That person can be out on the road doing his or her job, which is monitoring speeds. That is a practical move We have made it mandatory for people on e-scooters to have helmets and high-visibility vests. They have to be 18 years of age. That just happened in the past couple of weeks. Regarding the early train from Longford to Sligo, the Senator can contact me directly and we will raise that. Senator Costello mentioned nitrous oxide. Senator Byrne mentioned a number of roads. That is on the roads programme through the local authority. I think they are all someplace. They are on the agenda. If they come in through the roads request, which should be going in at this stage, we will see what is being delivered on the other side of it. The issue of drivers who are disqualified is something that we are looking at. The other thing is graduated penalties. If people are 5 km/h over the speed limit or 50 km/h over it, there should be two different types of penalty for that. I am bringing in legislation for that. It is hoped we will have it in before the end of the year. Gardaí engaging in pursuit during their duty need protection. We are bringing forward legislation and I have met the Garda and the Department of justice. We know what they want. We are talking to the Attorney General to bring forward draft legislation either through regulation or through legislation to help them. Aggravated endangerment is another request they have, that there would be legislation where, when gardaí are put in that position, they get that protection. I know from my meeting with the Garda and the Department of justice that there are more gardaí being trained as instructors in pursuit training and that they would be available from 1 January to start the pursuit training with gardaí in Templemore. That is important. Gardaí are using drones at the moment. They have been very successful in using drones in the pursuit of scramblers. More technologies will help. I have a written speech here, but I am just answering what Senators asked. We have more schools to come out on the safe routes to school programme. Work is being done and things are happening, but maybe we could be doing more things more efficiently and deliver more for the money we are spending on it. I will be looking at that. We are reviewing that at the moment. We will have some more schools that will be added to the list to get done too. Reflecting on what everybody said here, I am pleased that Senators all recognise the fact that this is not the RSA, which is being reformed. I meet the RSA regularly because I want to make sure it is doing what it is supposed to do. It has a plan to do things better. It is bringing in ambassadors. For sporting organisations in this country, it would be a simple thing and would cost nothing, where they have 20 or 30 players, whether footballers, hurlers, soccer players or whatever, who come to training and are under age, for those organisations to ensure it is said to those players before they finish training to make sure they put on their seat belts, put their phones away and drive safely on the way home. I learned this from the construction industry. Health and safety was not an agenda item, but every site meeting we had when we brought in the new rules meant we had to talk about safety, what happened on the site and whether there was an accident. That creates an agenda. We need to do that. It costs nothing. It is an attitude change. I am very strong on this, and very little is needed in terms of money. It is just to get people to say that this is their agenda for tomorrow night. They are going to talk about ten things, even at a community council meeting, and the last thing on the agenda is safety on the road. That is the type of thing we need to do to change attitudes. It would bring it into the home and into the school. I am delighted to have met some children, fifth class students, who got road safety training on bicycles. When I asked them what they learned, the first thing they told me was that they learned how to stop the bike, which is the most important thing. It is easy to pedal the bike, but how do you stop it? That is the first thing they told me. We have a very good basis. We are all working together. Every one of us has personal responsibility. Senator Flynn alluded to everybody having a personal responsibility. We have the Road Safety Authority, TII, the NTA, and public transport, which I think is a key enabler to reduce the number of people on the roads. I agree that we need to increase our rail freight. At the moment, 1% of freight goes by rail. We are investing in rail, so we need to make sure we see the dividend, which is fewer trucks on the road and more freight going by rail. Now that we have a connection into Foynes Port, that will help. All of them feed into road safety. I thank Senators for their co-operation among themselves in divvying up the time. If they have a particular issue, please contact us. I do not have all the answers so I rely on everybody to give their piece and their advice. --- 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