The Labour Party has called for the Road Safety Authority (RSA) to publish regular statistics about accident blackspots seven years after it stopped publishing monthly data.
It comes as the Department of Transport said that data has not been shared since 2016 because of GDPR constraints.
In a parliamentary question last September, Labour leader Ivana Bacik asked the Minister for Transport why the RSA has not published any data on road traffic collisions since 2016.
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She was advised that “in light of GDPR requirements, the RSA is currently reviewing their road traffic collision (RTC) data sharing policies and procedures”.
As a result, she said, individual record-level data cannot be shared.
Ms Bacik asked for an update on this review in last month and was told by Jack Chambers, Minister of State at the Department of Transport, that his Department, the RSA and the Gardaí are currently “engaged in a process to review the legislative basis for this data sharing and to update this if required”.
This, he said, is being done in consultation with the Data Protection Commissioner.
However, the Labour Party’s transport spokesperson Ducan Smith said that this was a “cop-out” as he called on the RSA to publish monthly data.
The party has argued that this could be done on an anonymised basis if there are GDPR concerns.
Deputy Smith said: “We are calling on the Road Safety Authority to be mandated to publish data on road traffic collisions in order to better inform Ireland’s transport strategy and ultimately to protect drivers and save lives.
“Data on road collisions was available on a monthly basis, but the RSA stopped publishing it here in 2016, seemingly for no reason at all.
“2022 was a very dark year for our roads with a 13% rise in road deaths recorded, and this trend is continuing into 2023.
“Having real time information about serious incidents and accident blackspots would be vital to try and tackle particularly dangerous areas.
“In Parliamentary Questions put down by the Labour Party, the Minister responded by saying the data is withheld for GDPR reasons – this is just a cop out. It is absolutely in the public interest to have this information available.”
Mr Smith stated that Labour has “consistently called” on Transport Minister Eamon Ryan to “commit to addressing a range of outstanding road safety issues”.
He continued: “This includes a review of speed signage and limits, particularly on country and rural roads where we know anecdotally that the majority of accidents occur.
“We need to move away from anecdotes, however, and introduce evidence-based policy measures for drivers.
“This data could also be utilised by the Gardaí to plan their patrols and placements of speed cameras better.”
A spokesperson for the RSA said that while it does not routinely publish record-level road traffic collision data online on a monthly basis, the RSA publishes RTC fatality figures on a map at specific intervals”.
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