Technology to tackle wrong-way motorway driving could be up to 15 years away, the Oireachtas transport committee has been told.
The director of network management at Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), Pat Maher, was also asked about spikes that could be deployed when wrong-way driving was detected.
He said that option had been researched but would not be practical, as has been considered the case in other jurisdictions.
Maher also pointed out that people could easily drive on to a motorway in the correct direction before turning.
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The committee session followed a crash on the M9 last month, which caused the deaths of five teenage passengers in a car travelling in the wrong direction. A child and three women were also seriously injured in the crash.
On the issue of when interconnected technology, including data from cars, could be used to combat wrong-way driving, Maher said there was not yet a simple answer.
“There is no one single silver bullet solution from a technological perspective that can resolve all the challenges that are associated with dealing with wrong-way driving,” he said.
“In Ireland, we are no different to our counterparts in Europe. Over the last weeks and months we have spoken with colleagues in the likes of Austria, who would be kind of highlighted as one of the better countries in relation to their efforts to deal with the same problem that we have.”
He said the feedback was that in the future, technology will allow road safety bodies to communicate with vehicles and control centres, but “that is going to take time; currently just 4 or 5 per cent of the fleet of cars has the required technology”.
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“So we will have to await the future scenario perhaps 10, perhaps 15 years hence, where the broader kind of deployment within the fleet of these communications technologies will allow immediate transmission of messages and alerts to drivers.”
Road Safety Authority (RSA) chief executive Sam Waide addressed the scale of casualties on Irish roads in his opening statement, saying the number of people killed in crashes had risen by 13 per cent this year compared to the same period last year.
Waide said there have been seven fatalities linked to wrong-way driving on motorways in 2026, up from just two between 2023 and 2025.
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RSA director of partnerships and external affairs, Nuala Carey, said social media platform TikTok had removed 42,000 videos of dangerous content in Ireland, including incidents of dangerous driving.
Waide said social media platforms would need to go further in blocking such content.
“They need to get better at actually stopping the videos being posted in the first instance, as opposed to a performance KPI of how quickly they take them down.”
The authority’s chief operations officer, Brendan Walsh, said he agreed that learner drivers should take lessons on motorways and that they were now under consideration.
