Only four gardaí have been added to roads policing in seven years, Dáil told

TDs also heard that the emphasis on GoSafe vans for the enforcement of road legislation amounts to 'a privatisation of the service'

There are 627 road gardaí employed in Ireland in 2024, an increase of just four from 623 seven years ago.

Just four additional roads policing gardaí have been added to the Garda roster over the past seven years, the Dáil has heard.

Some 63 people have died on Irish roads so far this year. In a debate on the issues on the roads, Minister of State at the Department of Transport Jack Chambers told TDs that the new Road Traffic Act 2024 was in the process of being finalised, with President Michael D Higgins signing the Act into law later on Wednesday afternoon.

That Act will see the enactment of mandatory drug-testing at road collision scenes, the awarding of multiple penalty points to drivers for multiple infractions in a single incident, and the dropping of Ireland’s national speed limit from 100kph to 80kph.

Mr Chambers said that, at the present rate of fatalities being seen, Ireland is on course to record more than 220 deaths in 2024, the worst for 15 years.

He said in light of that trend, the priorities for his department around road safety include a review of the budgeting and cost-effectiveness of the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and the resolution of a situation which has seen no road collision data shared by the RSA since 2020 over GDPR concerns.

The minister said that he had written to the Data Protection Commission seeking advice as to how to resolve the matter, and that legislation would be expedited to that end once the advice had been received.

However, the Opposition took issue with the number of gardaí on the roads. Sinn Féin’s transport spokesperson Martin Kenny noted that there are 627 road gardaí employed in Ireland in 2024, an increase of just four from 623 seven years ago.

Mr Kenny dismissed the Garda Commissioner’s recent declaration that all gardaí must perform roads policing for at least 30 minutes of each of their shift, saying “when I speak to gardaí they tell me they’re doing that anyway, they don’t need to be told”, adding that the idea could be seen as “a ploy” to distract from the low levels seen in the Garda traffic corps.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

He said that even within the figure of 627, a number of gardaí wouldn’t be working on the roads due to sickness or other workplace absences. The “biggest problem” he stressed, is that gardaí are no longer being seen on the roads, adding that the emphasis on GoSafe vans for the enforcement of road legislation amounts to “a privatisation of the service”.

Mr Chambers noted that 75 additional gardaí are to be deployed to the roads policing division in 2024, with the same number also to be added next year.

He added that technology will increasingly need to be used “on a wider basis” for road safety, and added that a new safety camera strategy will be published later this year that considers the possibility of deploying such cameras to detect people not wearing their seatbelts or using their mobile phones.

Green Party TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh, meanwhile, also called into question the RSA’s competence, and said he would be seeking the cost-benefit analysis the authority had conducted on the €240,000 it had spent on personal protective equipment last November alone.

He said he would expect “road safety to be significantly improved from that kind of investment”.