Ireland witnessed more devastation on our roads in recent weeks. Multiple fatal crashes have occurred across the island – the most recent being a multi-vehicle collision in Co Meath, in which two people died and another was critically injured.
We do not yet know the circumstances of these horrific incidents, but there is one thing we can say with certainty: Ireland’s road death trajectory is rising.
More people have died on the roads this year than over the same period last year and there have been more fatal collisions overall. Since 2021, road deaths have been rising.
Ireland’s road deaths are not random events, but part of a systemic trend; the consequences of a system that has allowed known hazards to sit unchanged for years.
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The death toll on our roads reveals something deeper about how Ireland governs itself: we are quick to announce ambitious targets, but we consistently fail to build the accountability needed to achieve such targets. It is a national pattern across all policy domains. Nowhere is it more painfully visible than on our roads.
Ireland’s official policy goal is ambitious: to halve road deaths and serious injuries by 2030 to 72. Yet from 2019-2024, road deaths in Ireland rose by 22 per cent whereas the EU average dropped 12 per cent.
While the trend in countries such as Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the UK continues to move steadily downward, Ireland’s is moving in the opposite direction, even as the State insists it has one of the most advanced road safety strategies in Europe.
In 2021, the Government launched its Road Safety Strategy 2021–2030 with confident promises and international comparisons. It was ambitious, compelling.
More than three years on, fatalities are higher, detections for some offences such as speeding are falling, high-risk routes remain untouched and our trajectory is drifting further away from the 2030 target.
[ Spate of deaths brings road safety into sharp focus amid national shock ]
How is this possible? The most basic reason is the strategy was launched without the one ingredient that determines whether any national target succeeds or fails: a clear line of ownership.
The more closely we examine this pattern, the harder it becomes to see it as an isolated lapse. We see the same dynamics in housing, health, climate and planning.
At some point, somebody somewhere should have asked what the underlying mechanisms of failure are; the unseen seams in the State that keep producing outcomes in which responsibility dissolves and innocent people pay the price.
Viewed structurally, the picture becomes clearer. The Government writ large made the commitment, but no single minister is responsible for delivering it.
The Road Safety Authority (RSA) oversees driver testing, licensing, research and public campaigns, but lacks the authority to mandate infrastructural change or compel compliance. The result is a system in which responsibility is so widely diffused that accountability disappears entirely.
And in the past year, that diffusion has deepened. The Government has now restructured the RSA, narrowing its remit further and shifting policy formation and the co-ordination of state agencies back to the Department of Transport – a department that controls neither enforcement nor the redesign of dangerous roads.
In effect, the one body with a national remit for road safety has been reduced to an operational role, while the department now responsible for policy still cannot compel the actors whose decisions determine whether roads are safe.
Rather than strengthening ownership, this reform fragments it further – widening the accountability gap.
The border region illustrates this with devastating clarity. Roads such as the N53 between Dundalk, Co Louth, and Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, have been known by locals for years as dangerous, narrow, badly engineered and jurisdictionally orphaned. I know this because I am one such local.
People travel every day – to work, to school, to friends – on the roads available to them, inside the system designed for them. Like so many before them, they enter a part of the network where survival is not guaranteed.
The recent deaths in Gibstown, Dundalk, were shocking: the deaths of five young people, and another three injured, made it the worst tragedy on an Irish road in 15 years. While we don’t know the cause, we do know that as long as Ireland’s road governance remains defined by this diffusion of responsibility, there will inevitably be more such deaths.
Ireland does not treat road deaths as structural failures. Rather, we treat them as unfortunate incidents that will be mourned but cannot be prevented. That framing protects institutions, not people.
Yes, dangerous driving exists, but other countries recognise that human error is inevitable. Their systems are built so that when mistakes happen, the risk of death is lower. Ours is built so that when mistakes happen, death is a more likely outcome.
Ireland relies on PR campaigns urging drivers to “be careful” as though caution alone could compensate for roads engineered without safety margins.
We remain one of the few developed countries with virtually no automated speed cameras, a proven, low-cost tool that reduces fatalities. As David Labanyi pointed out recently, the number of people being caught speeding and issued penalty points on Irish roads last year was 43 per cent below the level of a decade ago.
We fail to redesign known black spots. We allow local authorities to manage high-risk roads without national oversight. We set targets without giving any single body the tools or the budget to achieve them. Different arms of the State have authority over all facets of road usage: licensing, training, enforcement, engineering and sanctions.
Political accountability is nonexistent. The promises remain, but this is nothing more than governance without ownership. In short, we design a system that makes individual drivers responsible for outcomes that only infrastructure, enforcement and governance can meaningfully influence.
If the State truly intends to halve fatalities by 2030, it must first identify a body or individual responsible for delivering that reduction. Otherwise, the target is not a strategy; it is a wishlist.
The 166 people who have died on our roads so far this year have been failed by a system that knows what is required, but has refused for years to do it. They were failed by a country that tolerates dangerous roads, weak enforcement, fragmented governance and the absence of accountability.
Unless Ireland changes how it governs road safety – structurally, not symbolically – more families will experience the same grief.
Driver behaviour is part of the answer, but we don’t need more awareness campaigns or rhetoric about shared responsibility. We need ownership, consequences for inaction and a system designed to keep people alive.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School where she served as head of strategy of the HBS Institute for Strategy
