Ireland improves EU road safety ranking

Ireland is now ranked second out of the 25 European Union countries at reducing road deaths, provisional figures from the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) show.

This follows a 15 per cent decrease in road deaths between 2005 and 2007.

The ETSC figures for 2007 put Ireland in the top ten of best performing EU states in terms of overall road safety for the first time.

Ireland is now ranked ninth out of 25 states, an improvement of seven places on the 16th position achieved in 2005.

The figures were released today at the European Road Safety Performance Index (PIN) conference in Dublin.

Road deaths in Ireland fell from 396 in 2005 to 368 in 2006 and to 338 last year. So far this year, 88 people have lost their lives on Irish roads.

Speaking at the event, Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey said: "We have made good progress in reducing road deaths in recent years but we must never become complacent.”

"In 2001 the road death rate per million population in Ireland was 107. By 2007 the rate had fallen to 79 per million population putting Ireland below the average EU road death rate of 86 in 2007,” Mr Dempsey said.

Road Safety Authority chief executive Noel Brett: “Ireland’s efforts to reduce road deaths over this period were in contrast to an overall disappointing performance at EU level when for the first time in a number of years there was no reduction in the number of road deaths across the EU.”

ETSC’s programme manager Graziella Jost said: “Ireland’s outstanding achievement is encouraging for road safety organisations all over Europe.

“The next steps are to lower the blood-alcohol concentration limits and implement the safety camera network as early as possible in an effort to sustain similar progress in 2008,” she said.

Labour Party transport spokesman Tommy Broughan said it was critical that the latest figures do not lead to any complacency about road safety.

"The reduction from 365 road deaths in 2006 to 338 in 2007 was noteworthy. However, there were still more people actually killed on Irish roads in 2007 (338) than in 2003 when 335 people tragically lost their lives," he said.

"Astonishingly, January and February of 2008 had higher road death figures than the same months in 2007. The fall in casualties in March is clearly associated with two successive weekends of very high levels of Garda enforcement."

"Minister Dempsey, who may be in his last weeks as tansport minister, has failed to introduce key road safety legislative measures including empowering Transport Officers to inspect HGVs, lorries and buses. He has also dithered on the introduction of a new lower drink driving limit, regulations to prevent drug driving and the installation of the nationwide speed camera network."