Mr. Peter Walsh:

Yes, there are. The RSA develops the road safety strategy for the Government and monitors its delivery. I sit on a couple of committees with the RSA, with Sam Waide and his staff, and there are interactions between us regarding statistics and information relating to accidents. We get the statistics directly from the Garda, because we have a data-sharing agreement with the Garda, but we share them with the RSA. In respect of driver behaviour, driver attitude, patterns of seatbelt-wearing and so on, the RSA carries out quite a bit of research and we engage with it regularly on that.

We have very close engagement. It has a remit for public information and education and we rely on that. It is a trusted voice for communicating with users of the road network. When we were introducing variable speed limits on the M50 and this committee visited the motorway control centre to have a look, it was the RSA that we went to as the people to educate the public on that. Similarly, we have engaged with it on a number of reviews of the road safety strategy, where it is going and how it is going.

Nobody is at all complacent about how accident statistics have trended over the past while. In 2023, on national roads, the numbers fell for both fatalities and serious accidents but it was really marginal, so we are not seeing the improvement we saw in previous years. We are strongly of the view that it is a safe system approach, among seven different elements, including road infrastructure, vehicles and use of the road, and we work with the RSA to try to identify where that can be implemented. Nevertheless, we carry out our own analysis of the national road network, which I referred to earlier. One aspect is where we take all the accident statistics, map and analyse them and communicate all the figures for national roads with the local authorities. Where accident clusters are identified, we would ask that an assessment of that location be undertaken to see whether an appropriate engineering intervention could be adopted to address it, and then develop projects from that. That is one means of developing projects. The other is through road safety inspections, where we send out people to drive up the road, inspect it, pick up what they see as hazards and try to work those into programmes.

As for how closely we work together, the RSA does not fund projects as we do. Its remit is slightly different. We were very closely engaged for the development of the road safety strategy and we have a number of actions within it. We report through the RSA to keep track of their delivery and I am glad to say we are ahead on the commitments we made in that regard. I do not know whether I can say any more-----