Something has gone profoundly wrong in relation to Irish road safety and road usage. Extraordinary progress had been made in reducing the carnage of earlier decades: a shocking 640 people died on the roads in 1972. Road deaths had dropped more or less steadily until 2018 when there were 138 fatalities. But apart from 2021, when the country was effectively shut down by Covid, the numbers of deaths have been rising since. Last year, 184 lives were lost in road traffic incidents. Irish roads, North and South, are still much safer than some of our EU neighbours. But the upward trend is…

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