Labour TD Marie Sherlock has called for an urgent review of how road safety data is collected and used.
The Dublin Central TD was speaking after a parliamentary question revealed a significant gap between the number of serious injuries recorded in Garda collision data and the number of people admitted to hospital following road traffic collisions.
Figures from the Department of Transport recorded 14,071 serious injuries arising from road traffic collisions between 2016 and 2025, but HSE hospital data contradicts those numbers, with the HSE reporting 19,648 hospitalisations in the same time period.
Sherlock noted that the Department of Transport itself acknowledges that Garda data understates the true scale of serious injuries and points to hospital records as a more complete source of information.
“This raises fundamental questions about what data is informing roads policing, enforcement activity and local authority decisions about where safety improvements are most urgently needed,” she said.
“If we are truly serious about making our roads safer to encourage more people to walk and cycle around their communities, to cut congestion, the cost of commuting and emissions and to ensure we have healthier communities, then we need to ensure that local authorities and An Garda Síochana have access to all the available collision information,” the Labour TD said.
In 2024 alone, the number of hospitalisations with serious injury was 56% higher, or almost 1000 cases higher than that identified in Garda records.
Sherlock noted that anecdotally, many serious collisions never end up in Garda statistics, and that is “particularly true” for cyclists and pedestrians.
“In many cases, the immediate priority following a collision is securing emergency medical treatment rather than reporting an incident to Gardaí. As a result, people can suffer significant injuries, spend time in hospital and still never appear in the collision data used to assess road safety risks,” the Labour health spokesperson noted.
Labour research found that there are fewer Gardaí in the roads policing unit than there were in 2006, but 500,000 more cars have been added to Irish roads since then.
“This matters because if serious incidents are not being captured in official collision statistics, there is a real risk that dangerous roads, junctions and traffic environments are being overlooked,” Sherlock noted.
“Communities may be missing out on safety interventions because the full picture is not being seen. This is about whether children can walk to school safely, whether older people can cross the road with confidence and whether people can cycle or drive safely around their communities.”
“If we are not capturing the full scale of serious injuries, we cannot be certain that resources are being directed to the places where they are most needed,” the Dublin Central TD said.