Under the Road Safety Authority Act 2006, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) has a statutory remit to report on fatal, serious and minor injury road traffic collisions. The RSA receives collision data from An Garda Síochána for this purpose and produces official statistics to help develop evidence-based road safety interventions. Following engagement with and approval from the Data Protection Commissioner, a data sharing agreement has been agreed between An Garda Síochána and the RSA to underpin this data flow.
While An Garda Síochána data includes collisions and fatalities that occur in public places that are not a public road, such as car parks, analysis produced by the RSA is restricted to the collisions that occur on public roads. There is typically only small variation between these two figures, and reporting on the public roads figure is consistent with road safety reporting standards across the EU. However, I am considering whether a change in approach may improve the consistency of reporting in future.
