What would it take for politicians to want the slaughter on Ireland’s roads to end? I decided to find out.

In December, I wrote in these pages that Ireland’s road death trajectory was rising and that nobody was accountable for it. And unfortunately, 2025 ended as the deadliest on Irish roads in more than a decade. So far, this year has already added more than 25 deaths in the Republic in eight weeks.

Ten days ago, I decided to look at the numbers properly. Shockingly, there was no single place where you could see the full picture of this catastrophe, county by county, year by year, across the island. So I built a visualisation myself, which can be seen at StopRoadDeaths.ie. And what I found was horrifying, as the data showed a pattern so clearly structural, and so completely unaddressed, that it pointed to total institutional failure.

I sent that data to every TD and MLA on the island of Ireland – all 264 of them – and asked a simple question: will you commit to five specific reforms that could prevent future deaths?

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This is not Ireland’s first public health crisis of this size, but it is the first one we have declined to call by that name. A public health crisis has a specific medical definition, which does........

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