IRELAND’S RAPID IMPROVEMENT in road safety appears to have plateaued, as annual road fatalities are on track to increase for the second year in a row.

Some 126 people have died on Irish roads up to the end of August, while this figure was 137 for the whole of 2021, and 155 in 2022.

As the nation has been shocked and saddened by a number of particularly tragic incidents recently, the Department of Transport has said the reversal of decades of progress is “alarming”.

CEO of the Royal Irish Automobile Club Conor Faughnan told The Journal that road safety is “a battle that must be won year in, year out”.

“The sheer horror of this year’s road safety data is refocusing minds on it.”

Ad campaigns

Many people grew up watching harrowing television campaigns showing the heartbreaking consequences of dangerous driving.

A 2008 Road Safety Authority campaign titled ‘Crashed Lives’ interviewed crash victims and their families about the aftermath of dangerous driving. The highly-personal and provocative stories sought to demonstrate the very simple actions that can be the difference between life and death.

Other graphic ads showing the moments before and after fictitious crashes are burned in the national memory.

However, according to Michael Gormley, an assistant professor of Psychology at Trinity College, these ads are not as effective as they were once believed to be.

Australia, one of the first jurisdictions to implement shocking ad campaigns on road safety, is now rethinking this approach, as are many European countries.

Gormley, who attends road safety conferences regularly, has seen a “marked change” in the types of advertisements shown at events, with graphic content almost entirely removed.

The reason for this, he says, is that those “very threatening, violent” advertisements that were once commonplace “don’t have the desired impact”.

Research shows that people found such ads “so threatening that they ignored the information”.

“So what the adverts now do is they try to apply that threat less visually and that way they can get the information through to the road user a lot more effectively,” he said.

“Then you try to get the person to think about what the consequences are themselves rather than visually depicting it.”

Faughnan said that while we can’t ‘draw a straight line’ from shocking ads to reduced road collisions, past campaigns played a key role in changing public attitudes.

“You could debate the long-term impact in terms of driver behavior, but there’s no doubt they got tremendous cut through,” he said.

“It sort of shaped the moral landscape … it enabled us to win the moral argument.

Enforcement

Drink driving was once commonplace in Ireland but a series of laws and measures over the last fifty years have contributed to ‘dramatic’ improvements in road safety.

Laws, as well as the introduction of checkpoints, the breathalyser test, and the NCT,  meant Irish roads became unrecognisable to years past, when more than 400 people were dying annually.

2022 saw almost 200,000 speeding offences detected, over 5,800 people not wearing a seatbelt, over 18,200 people using their mobile phones and over 9,100 people arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated through drink or drugs.

In the midst of a staffing shortage, Faughnan says garda presence on the roads is not where it needs to be.

 ”There has to be physical presence of gardaí. I sympathise with their challenges, but I think that’s a major thing that we need to do,” he said.

“We need that more than new laws. Often when road safety hits a crisis, the minister of the day brainstorms up a new law or a tougher punishment, and this gets counted. But actually our law is strong.”

However, according to Gormley, earlier intervention is key.

“In terms of researchers, enforcement is never something that we’re particularly interested in, because we don’t want to live in a police state,” he said.

“If you get people to buy into the laws and the benefit of road safety, that’s a much better thing to do than to go out and put numerous gardaí on the roads.”

Speed limits

While Ireland may be on par with its neighbours when it comes to road safety, the country is unique in its highly-rural areas, where roads are often more treacherous.

Gormley says that the speed limits on country roads need to be revisited, as blanket rules for the whole country fail to consider individual roads’ risks.

As part of the government’s Road Safety Strategy, a review has been underway to examine the framework used for setting speed limits.

An assessment has been carried out on existing speed limits including the current guidance document used for setting them.

It also looked at best practice internationally and an analysis was carried out into other potential options.

Faughnan, who was involved in the 2013 review, said the limits are still “a little bit messy” and “could do with being tidied”. 

He says that a nationwide approach to setting speed limits can ensure less confusion for road users driving in unfamiliar areas.

“One of the things that I’d like to see coming out of this review is a better mechanism to ensure consistency of the application of the rules across different local authority areas,” he said.

However, he warned that the government and the public shouldn’t have “exaggerated expectations” for what it can deliver, as this alone will not prevent collisions.