Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE NUMBER OF people who died on Irish roads in 2015 was 165, a 15% drop from 2014, the first year figures have declined since 2013.
Figures published by the Road Safety Authority (RSA) show how 2015 saw 158 fatal collisions, resulting in 165 deaths on Irish roads. This meant there were 21 fewer fatal collisions and 28 fewer deaths compared to 2014.
This makes 2015 the second safest year since records began in 1959; the safest year was 2012 when 162 lives were lost. 2013 saw 188 lives lost and 2014 saw that figure increase to 193.
On average, there were 14 deaths every month in 2015, compared to 16 in 2014, while July and December had the highest number with 20 road deaths.
Other noticeable findings from the RSA’s report include:
Commenting on the figures, the chairperson of the RSA Liz O’Donnell said it was difficult to call 2015 a success but said that progress was being made.
It’s difficult to describe 2015 as a success when 165 people lost their lives on the roads … But the number of people being killed on the road is the only way we can measure success or failure and it’s important that people know progress is being made and their efforts are making a difference.
The focus for the RSA in 2016 will be on driver distractions like phone use while driving, the dangers of low-level speeding as well as drink driving and those drivers and passengers not wearing seatbelts.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Why do people continue to ignore seatbelts. The are a live saver in even a minor collision. A lot of those people would be still alive if they had their seat belts on.
I hear you. I’m a taxi driver and probably less than 10% of my rear passengers put on a belt without being asked to. My car has sensors in the rear seats too and some would rather get into a row with you about it rather than just buckling up. They seem to think you’re exempt in a taxi and disregard the fact seat belts are a potential life saver
@Karl
I had a similar problem in my car, a 7 seater mercedes estate. Was dropping the wife and her friends home from the pub one night after a work night out. Asked everyonbe 3 or 4 times to put on the belts but they were all too steamed and high jinks you’d expect after a free bar all night and music.
4 out of the 7 weren’t buckled up when I was stopped at a checkpoint. In fairness to the guard, I explained I asked everyone to buckle up and so instead of giving me tickets she gave each of the offending passengers one instead. I didn;t realise the gardai could do that. I thought the driver was on the hook for all of the tickets, but no it seems not.
I think over 17 or 18′s get the fine themselves. Anyone under that age the driver get the fine AND points!
27% of drivers who died were not wearing their seat belts. Practically every car has an annoying bell sound or bleeping sound to tell you to put on your seat belt for drivers.
Therefore perhaps some of these drivers intensionally took off their seat belts. Perhaps it was suicide. All the NCT tests and road safety adverts in the world won’t fix that problem.
I still cant find those seatbelts on my Honda 50.
Joke aside….Seatbelts save lives.
It has been proven beyond doubt except in very unusual circumstances.
Before I start the engine the seatbelt goes on. Simple, safe and life preserving.
Unfortunately some people killed on our roads are suspected suicides and have nothing to do with road safety. We need more invested in suicide prevention and mental health.
As above let’s keep these numbers down. Could you do a piece on the number of suicides by any chance?
Seems to be the white elephant in the room
It might be impossible to get reliable statistics. Sometimes a single vehicle collision is a genuine accident – it’s safe to assume that’s that’s the most likely scenario. But sometimes they aren’t. But how to tell the difference unless there is a note or some other circumstance that would facilitate a conclusion of ‘suicide’.
Some will be shift workers falling asleep at the wheel. It’s unfair the chat may begin of a suspected suicide.
It’s difficult to tell if single car collisions are suicides but one indicator is that there is typically no skid marks on the road, someone who just crashes into a wall normally gets on the brakes at the very last second before impact whereas suicides don’t.
I’d also like to see stats on 2015 suicides, they were at about 500 back in 2013 and had doubled in number during the recession
Thats really positive considering the carnage of the first quarter. Well done to all involved
More of the same in 2016, please.
Great news, I would like to see the overall accident statistics though as insurance is more expensive than ever…
Insurance premiums are gone mad! 16 years never had a claim,not even a windscreen, no penalty points ever! And they just seem to want fleece ya! Dearer it’s getting! And I’m not driving a Ferrari!
It’s an absolute disgrace, a complete unregulated shake down, you are required by law to have it but they can just pull their quotes out of thin air. The government provides them with a customer base because of the law and as such they should be required to follow strict and fair formulas when generating their quotations, not this free fall we have now.
The government also get their levy out of your premium! But no regulation as to the reasons given for the price hikes each year!
The number of accidents is skyrocketing, it’s obvious from my daily commute on the M50 and N7. Less of those accidents are fatal and it’s purely down to the way cars are being built, not down to driver behaviour. I was rear ended in my Focus at about 80km/h a couple of years ago. I stepped out of the car completely unscathed and the car was repairable. Other car was a write off but the occupants were fine. If we were in 2 older cars the outcome would have been very different. Also, one thing I did notice was people asking me if I claimed to their insurer to be injured because “that’d be a handy €20k”. And these same people give our about insurance going up.
I hear you! Cars are now designed to give more safety and less reliability. Designed to take an impact but not to be repaired easily. The most crashes I see now I can’t understand. They seem to happen on good stretches of road! The smartphone is the biggest culprit of road traffic accidents today!
A car is cheaper to replace than an arm. So it’s an understandable trade off. But my Focus has 8 airbags and is completely bulletproof reliability wise. 300,000km this week and a coil pack is all that’s gone on it in 7 years.
Yes a very good vehicle like 75% of the cars on the road today. Unfortunately in 3 years time you will face another levy of having a 10 year old car on the road. That’s a car with a full nct test that you have maintained to the highest standard!
Where do get “less reliability”?
JJ,
I would be very skeptical about accidents skyrocketing, but admittedly I do not drive on the M50 or the N7 so I do take your point but equally I drive around the city everyday of the week and honestly can’t tell you the last time I seen an accident.
Agree wholeheartedly about the people scamming the system for claims, that is without a doubt a big part of the problem. From personal experience they’re all in on it insurers, garages, lawyers, and of course the people themselves. I had a false claim against me and my insurance company just wanted to pay it rather than fight it, it absolutely infuriated me, and I had to settle it myself to save my no claims bonus. Which is something that bothered me alot as it highlighted how the way things are set up it was not in the interest of my insurer to represent my case as they stood to gain from me loosing my no claims bonus.
More sensors, egr valves, engine management lights, air flow meters, lambda sensors etc etc more plastic components and vehicles that will not be easily repaired if they receive the smallest impact!
Sean I’ve been doing the route for 4 years now on a daily basis and crashes have easily doubled. It’s a regular thing to be stopped on the motorway for an age as a crash is moved to the hard shoulder. On your point of your insurer wanting to pay out: the way the legal system is structured, it’s easier and cheaper to just pay out. The loss of your bonus is small fry compared to what their costs are.
As I said I don’t dispute what you have said, I only use those roads off peak so can’t give much insight into the level of accidents that occur there, but I will reiterate also that with most of my driving being in the city I can’t remember the last time I encountered an accident.
Regarding your defence of my insurer, I think you are forgetting that I am paying them to represent my interests, and am required by law to do so. So I am sorry but I have to take issue with them paying out in a false claim against me, which cost me my own money when I did no wrong, their legal costs are far from my concern, I pay them to take care of these eventualities.
Yes but it’s still a business. If they fought every case with solicitors, barristers and the courts, imagine the increases in insurance then. If the insurer wasn’t there, it’d be up to you to fight or pay out. If you fought it, the legal costs are on you. You’re paying them to manage risk, and to avoid any major financial loss on your end. This is done any way that’s best for both the insurer and the customer combined. There’s nothing in any contracts about mollycoddling the customer.
Here in lies the problem with your defense of insurers, I am a business man and have grown my own business from the ground up, so of course I understand the argument you put forward, however if my product does not satisfy my customer in terms either of cost or how it benefits them as a consumer they can just choose not to buy it, but that is not the case with insurance as we are required by law to have it.
Now I of course agree that this is correct, people on the road should be required to have insurance, but this changes the ball game for them as a business, as it puts them and the system as a whole into a position where they can exploit the customer, because unlike me they don’t have to satisfy their customers to obtain business, the Gardai enforce their customer base for them.
As such I think it’s fair to say that they need to be heavily regulated to ensure that they meet the needs of their customers or “mollycoddle” them as you put it, because they provide a vital service but one that is openly exploiting the consumer and yes that includes the legal costs that put them in a position where it is bad business to represent the case of the customer that pays their bills often without ever seeing anything in return.
I completely get what you’re saying re: customer satisfaction. But my point is this: would you rather they pay the €20k injury claim or multiple times that fighting it out in courts? While all this is going on there is an open claim on your insurance policy meaning, come renewal time, you’re stuck with the same insurer as no other company will touch you with an open claim on your policy. You might not immediately see how it benefits you, but it would become abundantly clear if you’re stuck with an insurer. Keeping the customer happy is completely eclipsed by keeping the customer protected. It’s extremely impersonal and cold I know.
Insurers are regulated Sean, who do you think checks the books, fines them and tells them to raise premiums.
The problem was that during a time of lighter regulation, companies like Quinn, RSA/123 were undercutting the market and underpricing premiums. Quinn went a step further and cross-collateralized assets. We’re all paying for Quinn now through higher premiums, and RSA (Ireland) had to get a big cash injection from the mothership and increase premiums. FBD are losing money.
It’s precisely because they’re better regulated that premiums are going up, along with a previous over-reliance on investing in financial instruments to cover the shortfall in premium collection.
Exactly Ronan. If insurance was unregulated, we’d all be paying €200 a month until the entire industry goes arse up due to no reserves for claims, similar to Quinn.
I think what you are missing with my point is that it is the system as a whole which is in need of much tighter regulation, while the example I have been giving focuses specifically on my gripe with my insurer, I do fully accept some of the points you make regarding their hands being tied with legal costs.
However we have what has become a very dangerous industry for the consumer, which is set up to extract money at various different levels, not just through policies, but as you have outlined legal costs, false injury claims, not to mention garages inflating estimates. All of this then becomes a burden on the consumer because the insurer must pass on increases to keep up with the risings claims, legal fees, etc. My point is that this is just not good enough, too many people are extracting far too much revenue from this legally required service and if insurers can just increase policy costs ad nauseum then it will never be in there interest to root out false claims in order to keep profitable, as you have perfectly outlined.
The motor industry, legal system, and to a point the HSE (doctors exaggerating injuries for an under the counter envelope) all have a part to pay too. No company in any industry wants to pay more than they need to. Back to my crash a few years ago. The damage to my car could have been fixed for €2,000, the garage gave me a docket for over double that. I nearly wanted to check if the silver paint on the new bumper contained actual silver. As Ronan said, regulation is the reason for the increases. In the past, the thing to do was keep premiums constant or lower by eating into reserves and not replacing them. That’s no longer happening. That aided to increased costs means we’re paying more every year. Ps. Apologies for everything being one paragraph. The android app doesn’t allow for otherwise.
Now you’re talking about repair cost from accidents. You’re probably right. But when it comes to reliability, cars have never been more reliable and roadworthy. Ever. Some sensors help you avoid accidents increasing the safety factor.
A reasoned discussion without anyone being told to f off, told he/she was a clown or worse.
Must be a first the this website
Credit to young people who are becoming very wise about this. Great news.
Well that’s some good news considering it seemed to me like there were road deaths nearly every second day reported on the news.
165 in 365 days is nearly every second day.
Then I find it hard to believe it was the 2nd lowest year!!
The statistics for each year are publicly available. Why would you find it hard to believe?
Here’s a chart from last year that doesn’t include 2015, but it’s not hard to hold the figure in your head and imagine it at the right hand end:
You having a fun day Grigori?
Road deaths have halved in less than 10 years. 1972 saw over 600 people lose there lives with a fraction of the number of cars on the road. Huge progress has been made, but at the same time there is no room for complacency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_traffic_accidents_deaths_in_Republic_of_Ireland_by_year
Judges and courts are very generous with awards and the lawyers fees in road cases That is why car insurance is going up so much
That’s hard to believe.
I agree Enda
While this is a positive trend, there are still 165 heart broken families this year around the country, and I think it’s easy to be immune to facts and figures. I think we would all agree the only acceptable number is 0 for fatal collisions. Insufficient road signage and road surfacing is a major problem that is a considerable contribution to these fatalities, and my family went through this nightmare some years ago. Hope this decline continues in 2016
Virtually all collisions are driver error, if your unsure if the road slow down.. If you cannot see the road surface slow down, you should be able to stop in the distance you can see to be safe and clear in front of you.
Pedestrian figure seems like the easiest number to reduce. It should be down at single digits really. A law on high viz clothes on rural roads and improved planning in small towns – lights, zebra crossing placement. I’ve seen zebra crossings put in crazy places, unfair to non local drivers when it could be placed another ten yards down the road.
Less people killed has to be a good thing, but, the fact that people simply can’t afford to drive around as much, probably has something to do with it as well.
Great result. Slowly Slowly. :)
With fewer kids on the road we will have fewer accidents.
Great I look forward to lower Insurance premiums in 2016 so.
Strangely enough… Ireland is,per capita, the safest country in the world to drive in right now.
165 is still too many road deaths
165 still too many road deaths.
165 is still too many road deaths.
have your say