I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for the invitation to appear before it today. I am the director of network management in TII. I am joined by my TII colleagues, Mr. Andrew O'Sullivan, senior operations manager for the eastern region, and Mr. Alastair de Beer, head of road safety.
I will first set out TII's role in operating and managing the motorway network. The National Roads Authority, operating as Transport Infrastructure Ireland since 2015, was established under the Roads Act 1993. It is the general duty of TII to secure the provision of a safe and efficient network of national roads, having regard to the needs of all users. The national road network comprises approximately 5,300 km of road, of which 4,000 km are single carriageway roads. The remaining 1,300 km are motorways or high-speed dual carriageways. Of these, approximately 460 km are operated under 13 public-private partnership, PPP, concessions, with the remainder operated under three regional motorway maintenance and renewals contracts.
The construction of the major interurban motorway network in the first decade of this century was transformative for the movement of people and goods and for road safety in Ireland. Between 2003 and 2010, over 800 km of motorways and dual carriageways were constructed, linking the major regional centres to Dublin. During that period, the number of annual fatalities on Irish roads fell from 396 in 2005 to 212 in 2010, with much of the drop attributable to the rapid expansion of the motorway network. Motorways are the safest category of road in Ireland. On a vehicle to kilometre-travelled basis, motorways are more than eight times safer in respect to fatalities than single carriageway national roads. In addition, Irish motorways also perform very strongly by international standards. The fatality rate on Irish motorways of 1.3 fatalities per billion vehicle kilometres compares favourably with the European average of 2.1 fatalities per billion vehicle kilometres.
Wrong-way driving on motorways is a phenomenon that is not unique to Ireland. Across Europe and more widely, the incidence of wrong-way driving is an ongoing challenge for roads administrations. In Ireland, the challenge of monitoring a network with more than 200 individual junctions and 800 motorway entry and exit points is considerable. Operational records for the years 2021 to 2025 collated by TII's motorway operations control centre, MOCC, indicate an average of 77 incidents per year. It is important to recognise, and this is also acknowledged in other jurisdictions, that the number of actual incidents of wrong-way driving exceeds the recorded numbers. From a TII perspective, the statistics are based on a combination of incidents notified to the MOCC by An Garda Síochána and members of the public, as well as those identified using roadside technologies like CCTV or radar detection, although the numbers identified using technology are comparatively low. In addition, MOCC staff also include any incidents subsequently identified via media reporting, social media, etc.
In any consideration of wrong-way driving, a clear distinction should be made between inadvertent wrong-way driving and deliberate wrong-way driving. Engineering countermeasures aim to prevent the occurrence of a wrong-way journey, detect them when they do occur and alert the errant driver. These measures will not deter a driver who is intent on driving the wrong way on a motorway.
Internationally, older drivers and younger drivers are heavily overrepresented in wrong-way driving. Generally, older drivers' actions are associated with medically related conditions. Younger drivers are associated with alcohol and drug impairment, as well as attempted escape from the police. In addition, some incidents are associated with attempts of drivers to self-harm.
TII is an active member of the Conference of European Directors of Roads, CEDR, through which it keeps abreast of issues and solutions across European road networks. In regard to the issue of wrong-way driving, CEDR carried out a number of surveys between 2011 and 2025 of European roads authorities, including TII. These surveys examined the measures being deployed in the various countries. The results indicated that common measures being deployed included enhanced signage and road markings at motorway exits, the installation of detection systems linked to warning signs and the use of variable message signs to provide warning to wrong-way drivers and other motorists.
More broadly, public awareness campaigns have been instituted and increased enforcement measures put in place. A key conclusion from these surveys was that there is no single stand-alone solution capable of fully dealing with the challenges of wrong-way driving. Instead, a combination of measures through the greater use of new technologies, together with enhanced public awareness and more effective enforcement, is needed to mitigate the problem.
In 2025, TII became a member of the data for road safety, DFRS, partnership. This is a European partnership bringing together road authorities, vehicle manufacturers and service providers to progress the harmonised exchange of safety-related traffic information that is intended to assist in the identification and response to critical safety alerts. This is a further source of information on vehicle and traffic technology and data that will help inform future developments on the Irish road network. Once a wrong-way incident is reported, the motorway operations control centre located at the Dublin tunnel records the event in the network intelligence management system and automatically activates relevant warning messages on roadside variable message signs.
The system also publishes alerts to the TII website, distributes information through digital feeds, notifies An Garda Síochána where appropriate and dispatches incident support units through the relevant road operator.
TII and the operators in the MOCC work closely with An Garda Síochána in responding to wrong-way driving incidents, as is the case across all aspects of motorway operations and traffic management. Post occurrence, the MOCC operators record all available details relating to the incident, including location, time, consequence, involvement of An Garda Síochána, etc. For those incidents where a driver has inadvertently travelled the wrong direction on the motorway and their entry point can be determined, a subsequent site assessment is carried out. Where clusters of wrong-way driver incidents have occurred, remedial measures may be implemented. These may include improved destination signage, warning signage, road markings and other measures.
In recent years, TII has installed new signage on all interchange off-slips on the motorway network to clearly and consistently inform errant drivers that they are travelling in the wrong direction. Furthermore, a number of technologies have been trialled across the motorway network to assess their effectiveness in detecting and warning drivers of wrong-way driving events. I will reference some of these and start with the wrong-way driver variable message sign, VMS, system. Radar detection technology that detects and subsequently notifies wrong-way drivers through the use of dedicated variable message signs was deployed at 12 junction slip-road locations on the N18 at Ennis and the M7 at Portlaoise. While the deployment produced some positive results, it was our experience that the technologies deployed were not yet sufficiently mature to be scalable across the motorway network.
New connected vehicle technologies now being deployed by a number of vehicle manufacturers will enable communication directly between vehicles and also between vehicles and motorway control centres. This will allow the delivery of in-vehicle warning messages to warn drivers that they are driving the wrong way or to alert oncoming vehicles of the danger. To support the development of these technologies, between 2019 and 2024 TII successfully undertook an EU co-funded co-operative intelligent transport system, C-ITS, pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying and utilising these technologies on the Irish motorway network. While similar projects were undertaken in other EU member states, Ireland was the first country to integrate this C-ITS technology into the operation of our control centre active traffic management system. It will be a number of years before comprehensive deployment of connected technologies can be achieved across the vehicle fleet but, once achieved, the capacity to provide in-vehicle warnings will be transformative in relation to the prevention of wrong-way driving incidents.
I turn to current trials. TII continues to monitor new technologies that come to market to assess their suitability for inclusion in our motorway operations. Currently TII is evaluating several further technology-based solutions. These include leveraging a data fusion engine to identify wrong-way drivers by analysing existing feeds from the roadside CCTV cameras and, second, by deploying roadside image detection systems employing radar, LiDAR, thermal imaging technologies and roadside digital display systems. We are also examining the potential of a specific cloud-based wrong-way driver warning system. This system compares vehicle movements against permitted directions of travel and could potentially alert the offending driver and approaching drivers through connected vehicle technology and motorway control centres. These innovations will, in the future, provide the means of effectively detecting and notifying drivers of a wrong-way driving event. What is yet unclear is the timeline to the general deployment of the necessary in-vehicle and roadside technologies.
Wrong-way driving on Irish motorways is a low-frequency but high-severity risk. Emerging in-vehicle technology will, in the future, provide effective alerts to drivers of wrong-way events. TII has significantly improved monitoring, incident management and data collection over recent years and will continue to actively trial advanced detection technologies. Intentional wrong-way driving is a societal problem and is not one that can be solved by engineering and technological solutions alone. A combination of road-traffic enforcement and appropriate deterrents through the justice system are also necessary elements in addressing the problem. I thank the committee.
