It is estimated that for every person who is killed on the roads, eight others are seriously injured. "Serious" is defined as either an injury for which someone is kept overnight in hospital, or incurs any of the following: fractures, concussion, internal injuries, crushing, severe cuts and severe general shock requiring medical treatment.
On that basis, some 3,200 people were seriously injured as a result of crashes on the State's roads last year. Many of those with the gravest conditions - major brain injury, spinal injury and amputations - are treated at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, the only such hospital in the Republic, where one in five beds is occupied by a crash victim. In its paediatric unit, the proportion is higher: 50 per cent of its children last week were admitted as a result of crashes. A quarter of the trauma-related cases on the hospital's waiting list are crash-related.
The NRH is under pressure. The international recommendation is 60 beds per 1,000,000 population for brain injury rehabilitation alone; the NRH has 120 beds for all categories. In the Republic there are five rehabilitation consultants; under Dutch standards there would be 74. Waiting lists for the high-dependency brain injury unit, which assesses patients in a minimally responsive state, can stretch to more than 18 months.
And because of improvements in triage, resuscitation and new surgical techniques, more people are surviving crashes with severe injuries.
"All of that is improving at the acute end, and as a result you have people surviving with greater levels of disability. That has huge implications for us and our ability to cope," says Dr Nicola Ryall, a consultant in rehabilitation medicine and chairwoman of the hospital's Medical Board.
"I think coming out to the NRH would sober many people up," she says. "There are fabulous patients here, but nobody plans to be here. It's an eye-opener. People think about dying [ on the roads], but when you survive, if you get a severe injury, then it is a life-changing event, there's no doubt about it."