Ireland is still not reducing its road safety record as effectively as other European countries, according to a survey of EU traffic safety across Europe.
Ireland is ranked 12th out of 29 European countries for road deaths, while the country is in 10th place in the ability to reduce fatal accidents.
The report by the European Road Safety Council, to be published later this morning, also found that a slight improvement in the fatality figures for 2006 was too small to have been anything other than chance, as opposed to a result of road policies.
The European Union has set a target of reducing road deaths by half in the ten years prior to 2010.
So far, only three countries are on target. France, Luxemburg and Portugal have reduced road deaths by 40% over the past five years. Ireland's performance continues to be average.
Eastern Europe is still struggling to cope with road accidents, with Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania all havingd more road deaths last year than in 2001.
Portugal has continued to improve, with road deaths down by one-fifth since 2006. The report says this is due to improved infrastructure and new motorways taking traffic away from narrow rural roads.
Luxemburg was praised for making road safety a political priority. The drink driving limit was reduced to 0.5 per mg and to 0.2 per mg for adolescents. In Ireland and the UK it remains 0.8 per mg for all drivers.
In France, which has performed consistently well since 2001, the authorities have rolled out 1,100 speed cameras and the number of detected offences doubled between 2005 and 2006.
In Switzerland, the number of drivers stopped for speeding and alcohol offences has doubled between 2000 and 2006.
But deaths remain a problem on European roads, last year 39,200 people were killed in traffic accidents.
