Proposed primary legislation, the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill 2025, will “provide the necessary legislative basis to facilitate the flow of information so that local authorities” may request, receive and process road collision data from both the Road Safety Authority and An Garda Síochána, the Department of Transport has said.
At the start of April last year, IrishCycle.com was the first to report that the Road Safety Authority has not shared crash data with councils for eight years. This was followed by the airing of an RTE Prime Time item on road safety, which included the issue with a lack of data sharing.
The issue gained further attention when politicians across a number of parties expressed disbelief that basic crash data was not being shared, which could allow councils to identify critical road safety issues which they need to address.
National officals claimed that requirements under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) meant there was no legislative basis for sharing data between the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and councils, but no detailed explanation has been given to date as to why the issue has taken around nine years to be resolved or why it took years for the RSA to admit publicly that there was an issue.
The Department said that this follows a Ministerial Order under Section 8 of the Road Safety Authority Act 2006 being signed last year to allow for the sharing of collision data between the RSA and An Garda Síochána.
Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien, and Minister of State Seán Canney, who has responsibility for road transport, welcomed today’s Government approval for the formal drafting of the legislation.
In a statement issued after Cabinet approval, Minister O’Brien said: “I am pleased to have secured approval from my Cabinet colleagues for the formal drafting of the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill. Passage of this Bill is a key road safety commitment in the Programme for Government and will ensure that local authorities have direct access to collision data when undertaking investment.”
He added: “The legislative amendments in respect of the National Vehicle and Driver File will also facilitate greater real-time access to the database by An Garda Síochána in future, assisting with enforcement and contributing to safety on our roads.”
Junior Minister Canney said: “Passage of the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill will contribute to road safety through infrastructure investment and enforcement, and will also bring improvements and efficiencies for drivers.”
He said: “Among these are abolishing the requirement to display a paper motor tax disc, and allowing for open-ended declarations that a car is off the road. The abolition of paper motor tax discs is part of a wider project to remove the need to display paper discs in windscreens, and I look forward to supporting the legislation through the Oireachtas in the coming months.”
The Department of Transport said that with the widespread deployment of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, Gardaí already has “immediate digital access to motor tax information” and that the new legislation “will remove the now unnecessary validation of tax compliance with a paper disc.”
The Department also said that the legislation also updates access arrangements to the National Vehicle and Driver File to reflect requirements from the GDPR, and removes end dates for declarations of non-use of a motor vehicle.
The National Vehicle and Driver File, maintained by the Department of Transport, is a centralised database of vehicles and drivers. The Departmentt said that the database is “widely used by state agencies, including the Road Safety Authority and An Garda Síochána, for a variety of road safety purposes.”
The statement said that the database is GDPR-compliant, “with data-sharing agreements in place with the relevant bodies and with appropriate internal controls on data access”. The Department said: “However, the relevant legislation underpinning access is being updated and strengthened by this Bill.”
The Bill, according to the Department, also contains “a minor technical amendment to the Road Traffic Acts in relation to the setting of speed limits.”
The Department said: “In addition to the provisions included in the General Scheme, two potential Committee Stage amendments were discussed at Cabinet and will be pursued further. The first of these relates to allowing GoSafe camera operators to provide certified evidence in court rather than needing to attend in person, thereby maximising the amount of hours of speed monitoring conducted.”
It added: “The second follows from a recommendation from the Haughton Report published in 2023, and seeks to ensure that a jury can consider a charge of careless driving where a defendant has been acquitted of the more serious charge of dangerous driving.”
We live in a system where a girl was allowed to die because she didn’t have a prescription for an epi pen while in anaphylactic shock. Saving lives needs to be a legally acceptable condition to bypass rules, by default, always.
Where someone got injured or died and road conditions were a contributing factor, the people who maintain the roads have to get the information needed to understand the problem and act to avoid further deaths.
To deny this information is negligent. I would rather leave a job or risk being fired than contribute to deaths by compliance. Isn’t that common sense?