Road safety data gap raises serious questions over enforcement and infrastructure decisions – Sherlock
Road safety data gap raises serious questions over enforcement and infrastructure decisions – Sherlock - The Labour Party
- More than 5,500 hospitalised road traffic casualties do not appear in Garda collision statistics
- Sherlock calls for urgent action to ensure all serious road collisions inform safety planning
Labour’s Marie Sherlock TD has called for an urgent review of how road safety data is collected and used, after a parliamentary question revealed a significant gap between the number of serious injuries recorded in Garda collision data and the number of people admitted to hospital following road traffic collisions.
Deputy Sherlock said:
“If we are truly serious about making our roads safer to encourage more people to walk and cycle around their communities, to cut congestion, the cost of commuting and emissions and to ensure we have healthier communities, then we need to ensure that Local authorities and An Garda Síochana have access to all the available collision information.
“The figures provided by the Department of Transport reveal a deeply concerning gap in our understanding of road safety in Ireland. Between 2016 and 2025, Garda collision data recorded 14,071 serious injuries arising from road traffic collisions. Yet HSE hospital data recorded 19,648 hospitalised road traffic casualties between 2016 and 2024. That is a difference of more than 5,500 cases. Most worryingly is that the trend in serious road injuries reported to An Garda Síochana between 2022 and 2024 has gone down, whereas the number of hospitalisations in that period has gone up.
“In 2024 alone, the number of hospitalisations with serious injury was 56% higher, or almost 1000 cases higher than that identified in garda records. Crucially, less that half of the cycling hospitalisations end up being recorded by An Garda Síochana.
“The Department itself acknowledges that Garda data understates the true scale of serious injuries and points to hospital records as a more complete source of information. This raises fundamental questions about what data is informing roads policing, enforcement activity and local authority decisions about where safety improvements are most urgently needed.
“The recent publication of the RSA’s collision map for the Republic was a significant long overdue breakthrough in identifying collision locations and sharing that information with local authorities, but because it is based on Garda data, we know it seriously understates the true level of collision.
“We know anecdotally that many serious collisions never make their way into Garda statistics and that this is particularly true for cyclists and pedestrians. In many cases, the immediate priority following a collision is securing emergency medical treatment rather than reporting an incident to Gardaí. As a result, people can suffer significant injuries, spend time in hospital and still never appear in the collision data used to assess road safety risks.
“This matters because if serious incidents are not being captured in official collision statistics, there is a real risk that dangerous roads, junctions and traffic environments are being overlooked.
“Already we have seen an effective real cut to the active travel budget for local authorities with more spent in real terms in 2020 than in 2026. While the €119.85m in active travel and Bus Connects cycle funding for 2026 across the four Dublin local authorities is delivering very necessary cyclepaths and safer pedestrian access , the reality is that all other roads within our biggest city are being neglected with just €3.1m or 0.2% of the total roads budget for 2026 going to ordinary road improvement this year (Dublin city council got €41,000 in 2026). It is on these roads that serious collisions take place.
“Furthermore, my Labour colleague Ciarán Ahern TD has very clear that there are less gardaí in roads policing now than there was almost 20 years ago, yet there are 500,000 more cars on the roads.
“Communities may be missing out on safety interventions because the full picture is not being seen. This is about whether children can walk to school safely, whether older people can cross the road with confidence and whether people can cycle or drive safely around their communities. If we are not capturing the full scale of serious injuries, we cannot be certain that resources are being directed to the places where they are most needed.
“We need a much stronger approach to integrating hospital admissions data with collision reporting systems so that policymakers, local authorities, An Garda Síochána and the RSA have access to the most complete picture possible. Government must now act to close this data gap, improve reporting systems and ensure that road safety policy reflects the reality experienced by all road users across the country.”
Link to full PQ: https://labour.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/RRD_Res_20260420_404_serious-injuries-draft-FINAL.docx