We are facing a road safety crisis in Ireland. It is worsening year on year. After a stint of progress earlier this decade, recent years have seen a deeply worrying trend of increasing deaths. There were 190 in 2025, 175 in 2024, 184 in 2023, and 155 in 2022. They are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose lives were tragically taken from them and families who have been destroyed by this. This is not for lack of policy, because we have the Vision Zero policy running from 2021 to 2030 which seeks to halve road deaths by 2030 and eliminate all road deaths by 2050. We are halfway through that time period now and the Government is not meeting the targets in that policy. We continue to see life after life being lost on our roads. Phase 1 of that policy, which ran from 2021 to 2024, saw investment of €3.8 billion. It had a target of 122 or fewer deaths. It was not met. Phase 2 runs until 2027 and we are halfway through that phase now. There is no target for that period. That speaks volumes and it seems to me that the Government has, unfortunately, given up on this. The overarching national target remains a 50% reduction by 2030, meaning annual deaths should at this point be down to 72 or fewer, which is still 72 too many. So far this year, we have seen 11 people lost on our roads. Policies mean nothing if implementation fails. What we are witnessing is a steady, consistent rise, year after year, at a time when our national strategy had promised to do the exact opposite. The Road Safety Authority, gardaí and indeed the Minister of State's Government colleagues have acknowledged the worsening trends and the need for a reset of approach, but the pace of change is simply too slow. Enforcement remains inconsistent and vulnerable road users are bearing an increasing share of this danger. Without a major acceleration in the delivery of road safety measures, we will see more people lose their lives on our dangerous roads. It is down to driving behaviour, speeding, congestion, lack of enforcement and deficits in infrastructure. There is no single solution to this, because a series of measures need to be taken on board and implemented. We are just not seeing movement on that quickly enough. I will talk about a road. Ideally, our roads would not be a priority for building. We have climate obligations. However, some of our roads are just so dangerous at the moment that there is a need to put resources into them to make them safer. I will specifically talk about the N81, which runs from Tallaght through west Wicklow and Kildare. It stands out for all the wrong reasons. It is the only road outside Dublin that has never been upgraded and is one of the major national roads still operating as a single-lane route for most of its length. Each morning, the N81 is a long line of red tail lights. A single collision, big or small, can bring the entire route to a standstill for hours. It is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. I and others have been calling for it to be addressed for years. Despite all these repeated calls, it was not included in the national development plan for 2027, and Government signals about it have been vague at best. While recent interactions have indicated that it may be advanced before 2030, no firm commitments, timelines or funding allocations have been given to me. I would appreciate if the Minister of State could look into this. A road as dangerous as the N81 cannot be left in limbo like this any longer. It needs to be brought to the same standard as other national routes in Ireland. As I said, there is not a single solution to road safety. What we are seeing is that many roads are at capacity now. We see increased congestion, which leads to more risk of accidents and poorer driver behaviour. A key element of the solution to this is improving our public transport. I know a stated aim of the Government is to improve public transport, but I and my constituency in Wicklow have not seen that happen. I will give an example. This morning, on East Coast Radio, a young woman, Mischa Cleary, was talking about how she had to drop out of her college course in Grangegorman, where she was doing politics. She had to drop out this year because she could not get public transport to college and she cannot afford to live there, the same as many other students. Her town was promised a bus, the 199 service. The NTA told me that funding was available for it last May and that it was a priority. It was meant to start in September. It still has not started. I have repeatedly raised this. Indeed, I have raised it with other Ministers too. I ask the Minister of State to look into this. It is not acceptable for a young student like Mischa to have to drop out of college because a simple Local Link has not been delivered nearly a year after it was meant to be.

Sentiment score: -0.06