What would it take for politicians to want the slaughter on Ireland’s roads to end? I decided to find out.
In December, I wrote in these pages that Ireland’s road death trajectory was rising and that nobody was accountable for it. And unfortunately, 2025 ended as the deadliest on Irish roads in more than a decade. So far, this year has already added more than 25 deaths in the Republic in eight weeks.
Ten days ago, I decided to look at the numbers properly. Shockingly, there was no single place where you could see the full picture of this catastrophe, county by county, year by year, across the island. So I built a visualisation myself, which can be seen at StopRoadDeaths.ie. And what I found was horrifying, as the data showed a pattern so clearly structural, and so completely unaddressed, that it pointed to total institutional failure.
I sent that data to every TD and MLA on the island of Ireland – all 264 of them – and asked a simple question: will you commit to five specific reforms that could prevent future deaths?
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This is not Ireland’s first public health crisis of this size, but it is the first one we have declined to call by that name. A public health crisis has a specific medical definition, which does not include a run of bad luck or a cluster of unrelated tragedies. Rather, it is a pattern of preventable harm, concentrated in an identifiable population, driven by known causes, for which interventions exist yet are tragically not being deployed. What is happening on Ireland’s roads meets every criterion; further, the victims are disproportionately young – 38 of those killed on the Republic’s roads in 2025 were aged between 16 and 25, losing on average decades of productive life.
Public health researchers have a specific way of measuring this burden: years of potential life lost, which weights each death by how many years the victim had ahead of them. By that measure, 190 road deaths in the Republic last year destroyed more “years-of-life” than prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer and cervical cancer combined. Fewer deaths, but with younger victims, means more life lost.
The Road Safety Authority (RSA) does not even calculate years of potential life lost, and the Department of Transport does not report road deaths as a public health metric. This analysis had to be assembled from first principles, by me, a private citizen, cross-referencing RSA fatality data with National Cancer Registry mortality reports. The body established and funded to do exactly this work is more focused on awareness campaigns and an eight-year-long legal issue that prevents it sharing collision data with the engineers who need it, according to RTÉ’s Prime Time.
When the CervicalCheck controversy came to light, the annual death toll from cervical cancer in Ireland ran at approximately 90 people per year, and the State’s response was immediate and comprehensive: a scoping inquiry, Oireachtas hearings, a compensation scheme running into hundreds of millions of euros, legislative reform and a formal taoiseach’s apology. The response was proportionate and right.
Yet last year, one person died every 35 hours from a road traffic crash across the island. The difference is not the scale but that the failings of the CervicalCheck programme affected the lives of named women and named institutions and had a causal chain. The difference, therefore, is visibility.
What I found when I contacted all 264 politicians was something more troubling than indifference; a political will that exists in fragments, with no institutional structure to convert it into anything that could possibly save lives.
One hundred and three elected representatives across six parties – North and South of the border – responded within 10 days with substantive commitments to reforms that Ireland should have adopted a decade ago.
The Social Democrats said they would adopt all five reforms as party-wide policy within a week. Labour followed. Sinn Féin said all 38 of its TDs and 27 MLAs formally backed the demands as party policy.
The majority of the Opposition supports reforms the Government has failed to act on. Sinn Féin also secured the addition of road safety governance to the North-South Ministerial Council’s transport agenda.
Parliamentary questions were tabled from five parties, and the chair of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport accepted a formal submission and placed a request for oral evidence on the agenda. Individual TDs from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour and the SDLP engaged seriously, many tabling questions with wording the campaign provided.
The five demands are deliberately structural, specific and deliberately binary:
- a statutory road safety commissioner with the authority and mandate to deliver the 2030 target, ending the current system where responsibility is diffused across so many agencies that nobody is accountable when the targets are missed
- automated speed cameras on high-risk routes – Ireland has 12; Finland has more than a thousand
- a funded programme to redesign the deadliest road sections, with published timelines
- a reversal of the enforcement collapse that has seen speeding detections fall 43 per cent in a decade.
- a parliamentary question from every representative contacted, so the answers will be on the public record.
Because engagement is not the same as accountability, which is what actually saves lives, I published every response on the website’s public TD tracker.
While many have made commitments, 194 representatives have still not responded.
The 2030 target is three years away. On the current trajectory, there will be something close to 240 deaths on the Republic’s roads alone in that year, against a target of 72. It is a policy failure of the same order as any other public health catastrophe this country has faced. In those other cases, Ireland eventually demanded to know who was responsible. On roads, we have not yet asked the question seriously.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School. She runs the road safety accountability campaign at stoproaddeaths.ie.
