Editorial: Road accident report highlights the need for fresh thinking

The Road Safety Authority’s report, “Serious injuries in Ireland using hospital and An Garda Síochána data”, provides vital context to the present debate on road safety. The analysis shows it’s not just the devastation of deaths from road crashes that have to be taken into account but the thousands of lives being affected by serious injuries too.

The report looks at serious injuries in road accidents over the period from 2014 to 2022. The use of hospital data along with garda figures is important, as it is recognising that policing data alone will understate the number of serious injuries from traffic collisions.

The report brought together hospital records from the Hospital In-Patient Enquiry database and collision records from the Irish Road Traffic Collision database from An Garda Síochána. And the findings present a drastic picture, far worse than what was previously envisioned.

Over these years, a total of 18,021 casualties were hospitalised with injuries from traffic collisions. During the same period, gardaí recorded 10,687 serious injuries. The absolute number of hospitalised casualties and serious injuries increased up to 2019, declined during 2020, and continued to increase in 2022. The lockdowns of Covid-19 clearly had a brief impact. The number of hospitalised casualties and An Garda Síochána-logged serious injuries recorded in 2022 was the highest of the entire period. The figures are not just bad – they are getting worse.

A particular anomaly was identified in the area of cyclists. The highest discrepancy between the data sources was observed for cyclists, where there were between two and three hospitalised cyclists for each cyclist recorded by gardaí as seriously injured. And cyclists accounted for 31pc of hospitalised casualties and 20pc of garda-recorded serious injuries.

A generation ago, the introduction of penalty points for drivers, coupled with a dedicated road-traffic unit of the gardaí, did bring about a dramatic improvement in road safety. It wasn’t just that drivers were conscious of being caught. It forced them to think about their actions and this prompted a greater awareness of speed, safety and sharing the roads with other users.

Around the same period, graphic TV ads demonstrating the shocking consequences of road crashes and driver negligence were also appearing.

But such impacts have a shelf life and it’s time for a fresh impetus on road safety. The knee-jerk announcement by Garda Commissioner Drew Harris that gardaí must spend 30 minutes of their shifts on patrol on roads policing wasn’t a strategy – it was a soundbite.

Clearly a broader plan is required, which involves greater levels of manpower being dedicated by the gardaí specifically to traffic enforcement. Likewise, legislation will have to examined by the Oireachtas.

The scourge of mobile phone use while driving must be eradicated, but this is not the only area where ­drastic reform is required to make the roads safer.