Driving towards a more proactive model
Conor O’Dwyer, Government and Public Sector Partner, EY Ireland, considers how emerging international approaches to technology, connected data, enforcement, and administration are reshaping road safety and the lessons they may offer Ireland.
Ireland has made enormous progress on road safety over the past three decades. Since the first national Road Safety Strategy in 1998, road deaths have fallen dramatically and, by 2019, Ireland was the second safest EU member state. Better infrastructure, safer vehicles, legislation, enforcement, and changes in public behaviour all played their part.
Recent years have, however, proved more challenging, with some reversal of the progress achieved. There were 171 deaths on Irish roads in 2024 and 185 in 2025, an 8 per cent increase. By 2 October 2026, 142 people had already lost their lives, compared with 128 at the same point in 2025. Behind every one of these numbers is a lost life, a family changed forever, and a community left to absorb the consequences.
Ireland’s Road Safety Strategy provides the national framework through to 2030, with ambitious targets for reducing deaths and serious injuries. It builds on a strong record of collaboration across the agencies responsible for road safety, policing, and transport. The opportunity now is to continue evolving that framework by drawing on the technology, data, and operating models emerging internationally.
Anywhere, anytime
Australia provides some particularly interesting examples. Queensland’s approach to mobile phone and seatbelt enforcement is built around the proposition that enforcement can take place “anywhere, anytime”. Fixed cameras operate continuously, while portable cameras are moved between urban and regional locations. High-angle imagery looks into the vehicle and artificial intelligence filters images for potential mobile phone and seatbelt offences, before a human officer determines whether an infringement has occurred.
The penalties are also materially higher than their Irish equivalents. Illegal mobile phone use in Queensland currently attracts a A$1,295 fine and four demerit points.
The point is not that Ireland should replicate another jurisdiction’s penalty schedule. What is interesting is the combination: technology increases the likelihood of detection while a meaningful sanction reinforces the deterrent.
As Joe Le, EY’s Global Road Safety Lead, observes: “Technology influences behaviour when it changes the driver’s expectation of being caught. The objective is not simply more cameras; it is a system in which unsafe behaviour is consistently visible, enforceable, and difficult to rationalise away.”
From hindsight to foresight
Perhaps the more significant development internationally is the move from understanding collisions after they happen towards identifying risk earlier.
Australia is increasingly connecting information traditionally held in separate parts of the system.
International benchmarking undertaken by EY found Australian models integrating transport, police, and health information, with fatality data shared frequently and serious injury information brought together through cross-agency databases. Integrated systems can then be used to identify high-risk areas and target interventions.
That requires more than technology. Effective data sharing depends on agreed ownership, access rights, privacy and legal safeguards, common definitions, and a secure platform through which organisations can exchange information.
AI adds another dimension. Rather than simply producing better dashboards, advanced analytics can look across large datasets for patterns in behaviour, road conditions, and network performance, potentially highlighting emerging risks before they translate into collisions. Australian research involving Transport for NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia is examining how connected vehicle data, telematics, and AI can support more proactive and predictive network management.
The longer-term frontier may be vehicle-generated data itself. Modern connected vehicles can generate information on speed, braking, acceleration, location, and other driving characteristics. Australia has established an industry-government working group involving road authorities and vehicle manufacturers to examine how aggregated and anonymised vehicle data could generate public value, particularly for road safety.
The potential is significant: moving from asking, “where did collisions happen?” towards “where is risk beginning to emerge?”
Who needs to do what?
International experience is also interesting from an operating-model perspective. In New South Wales, Revenue NSW rather than the police manages much of the downstream administration associated with fines, including payment, review, and recovery.
The Netherlands provides another model. Once an investigative body establishes a traffic offence, the Central Judicial Collection Agency (CJIB) sends and collects the fine and manages subsequent enforcement of non-payment.
Germany offers a further variation: traffic offences may be detected by police or another authority, while administrative Bußgeldstellen, or fine offices, undertake the subsequent infringement process. The precise institutional model varies across Germany.
None provides a blueprint that can simply be lifted and applied to Ireland. They do, however, illustrate an important design choice: policing an offence and administering every subsequent step do not necessarily need to sit in the same place.
Culture change is the destination
Technology, data, and organisational design are ultimately enablers. The real objective is safer behaviour.
Ireland has demonstrated before that road user culture can evolve. Drink driving and seatbelt use show how legislation, enforcement, education, and changing social attitudes can reinforce one another until behaviour once tolerated becomes unacceptable.
As Le reflects, drawing on the internationally recognised Safe System approach to road safety: “A Safe System does not assume perfect road users. It creates layers of protection around human fallibility, while building a culture in which dangerous behaviour becomes socially unacceptable.”
The international picture suggests there will be no single breakthrough. What is emerging instead is a more connected model: pervasive but proportionate technology, compliant multi-agency data, AI-enabled insight, better use of connected vehicles, effective enforcement, and operating models that allow specialist resources to concentrate on the activities where they add most value.
For Ireland, the opportunity is less about importing any one model and more about continuing to learn from what is working elsewhere and considering where those insights can complement the substantial road-safety work already under way at home.
