The Department of Transport has confirmed to Prime Time that crash data related to 80% of the road network was not included in a centralised analysis it undertook to inform road safety interventions.
Local roads make up 81% of the nationwide road network and are the responsibility of local authorities, but collisions which occurred on such roads were not covered by the Department's analysis.
This is despite the analysis being conducted by the Department for local authorities because local authority road engineers have not had access to up-to-date collision data in years due to a GDPR concern which arose in 2020.
Collision data is used by road engineers across Europe to inform safety-related design and layout changes.
Details of the GDPR problem were revealed by Prime Time earlier this month.
Read more: How a lack of crash data is hampering Ireland's road safety aims
Since then, when he has been asked why local authority road engineers were being left "in the dark" in relation to the data, Minister of State Jack Chambers has regularly noted that the Department of Transport’s centralised analysis was instead conducted.
On Monday, on Today with Claire Byrne, Minister Chambers said, "all of the information is centrally analysed by the Department of Transport and - on the basis of that analysis - the local authorities are able to apply for road safety interventions."
"So that would include wherever there has been a particular issue on a particular road, it would not be discriminatory between different types of roads," Minister Chambers said.
However, the Department of Transport has now confirmed to Prime Time that the data which was centrally analysed related only to collisions on regional roads. Such roads account for just 12% of the overall road network.
The Department further confirmed that a centralised analysis of collisions nationally has been conducted twice since the issue arose four years ago.
It said the analysis "commenced with a Pilot Study in Cork and Kildare in 2022" and this was then "extended at a national level."
"The collision analysis involved a high-level analysis to identify clusters and locations of interest," according to the statement.
Within identified clusters, "a micro analysis of collisions" was also conducted, the Department said.
This included "observations such as direction of travel and weather conditions, collision year, severity and type."
Read more: Rising road deaths: Why is Ireland bucking the European trend?
As detailed earlier this month, until 2020 roads engineering teams in local authorities had access to a detailed interactive map system populated with specific information on individual collisions.
The data was provided by the Road Safety Authority (RSA), based on information from the Garda PULSE system.
However, early in 2020, a legal issue arose within the RSA about whether under GDPR legislation it could share the data with several public bodies, including the local authorities.
At that time, the most recent data uploaded into the map system related to collisions which occurred in 2018. It was not updated thereafter.
In late 2023, with the GDPR issue still outstanding, all the pre-2019 data was also removed from the mapping system. As a result, local authority roads engineers do not have any access to the collision data map.
A spokesperson for Minister Chambers was contacted for comment in relation to this story, but none was provided.
Minister Chambers has previously said that a process is underway to resolve the GDPR-related issue as urgently as possible.
