A 60 KILOMETRE-per-hour speed limit on local roads is set to be put in place in November, according to the Minister of State at the Department of Transport.

James Lawless said that reduced speed limits, announced by the Government last year, are being introduced on a “phased basis”.

The planned changes include speed limits being lowered from 100 km/h to 80 km/h on national secondary roads and from 80km/h to 60km/h on rural roads.

Within towns, cities and built up areas, the limit will be 30km/h, while roads on the outskirts or arterial routes around urban areas will have a limit of 50km/h.

The 120 km/h speed limit on motorways and 100 km/h on national roads will remain as they are.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Lawless said: “The intention is that in November of this year, by year end, the 60 kilometre default local road limit will be introduced.

“That will be followed in the early new year by the regional road limit and so on.”

The announcement was made in response to an increase in road deaths last year. 184 people were killed on Irish roads last year, up almost 20% in a year and 33% higher than before the pandemic.

This year, there have been 105 fatalities on Irish roads, an increase of fourteen on the same period last year. 

Lawless said two pieces of legislation were approved by Cabinet yesterday “to correct some anomalies within the system”. They will be introduced in the Dáil in the next term. 

“The first one was data sharing between the local authorities, the Road Safety Authority and An Garda Síochána,” he said. 

“Historically, at the scene of a crash, the Gardaí are first investigators, first responders, and they would collect information as part of an investigation as to the causes, the road conditions, the who, what, when, and that’s obviously very useful to roads engineers and local county council. 

“If there’s a pattern identified, they can take remediation action and maybe look at straightening out the road, or the road surface or whatever technical issues may arise.”

He said an issue arose with sharing that data relating to GDPR “and other technical reasons”, which was flagged by the local authorities themselves.

“They said look, we’re not comfortable receiving this data for various technical legal reasons. So this puts that back on a solid footing. There’s a foundation there that the data can be shared from the Road Safety Authority, from the Department of Transport, on to the local authorities.”

He said he hoped that the Bill would be enacted before Christmas. 

The second piece of legislation will end the need for paper tax discs. Currently, motorists are legally required to display their motor tax disc to drive in a public place. 

“We’ve had the discs since pre independence. 1920 is the year that our road tax disc was introduced. There’s a lot of water under the bridge since 1920 and most countries now would have a digital footprint,” Lawless said.

He said Gardaí now use automated number plate recognition (ANPR), where they can scan a registration plate and see if the driver is insured, have they been disqualified from driving or if the car is stolen.

“For the ordinary road user, the habitual practice of opening up the envelope in the letterbox, taking out the disc, carefully cerating it so it doesn’t tear and getting it on the dashboard of the vehicle, that would be thing of the past,” he said.