A €6 million funding request from the Road Safety Authority to hire additional staff as part of an expansion of its road safety media campaigns in a bid to reverse a surge in road deaths in 2023 was declined by the Department of Transport.
The RSA sought the funding in response to a call by the department last August for suggestions of “any emergency measures that might be put in place which could have an impact by year-end” on the “very difficult trends we are seeing in terms of road fatalities”.
Last year, 184 people died on Irish roads, an almost 20 per cent increase on the previous year.
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show RSA chief executive Sam Waide responded to the request with a range of proposals, including the hiring of nine extra staff and significantly expanding safety campaigns over the coming months.
In his letter of September 26th, Mr Waide said it was “of vital importance that the staffing complement be actioned immediately as the current staffing levels are incompatible with this concerted scale-up of activities”.
“Timely sanction and recruitment of staff, including immediate agency support, is required to meet the timelines outlined.”
The new staff requested included those with communications expertise, education campaign managers and a legal specialist to work on the speed limit review. Seven of the new roles sought were listed as at higher executive officer level on the civil service scale and two at assistant principal level.
While the cost of the additional staff was redacted in the documents released under FoI, based on the upper salary level of these grades, it would be more than €600,000 per annum.
The RSA told the department the expanded road safety campaigns would be launched in the final three months of 2023, with the remainder scheduled for the beginning of this year.
The extra measures proposed included “awareness initiatives” such as increased advertising spend on campaigns highlighting the dangers of drink driving, and others focusing on speeding, distracted driving and drug driving.
Other RSA suggestions to counter the sharp rise in road deaths included a call for significantly increased Garda enforcement and the introduction of emergency legislation to sharply increase penalties for some traffic offences.
In its response to Mr Waide on October 10th, a senior department official said the priority was information campaigns which could be “implemented immediately”.
The official also said further exploration of the RSA’s proposals was required and that as a result, “I am not in a position to confirm that additional funding will be available in 2024.”
The response also noted that “as staffing requests for 2024 are not yet finalised, the work will have to progress with the current staffing and external agency support”.
The department instead said the RSA could draw on its own financial reserves to fund additional road safety campaigns over the remainder of the year. No new staff were hired. While the RSA is a self-funding organisation it needs department sanction to hire permanent staff.
At the start of this year, in response to a parliamentary question from Fine Gael’s Colm Burke, Minister of State with responsibility for Road Safety Jack Chambers said: “Last October my department conveyed sanction for the RSA to spend €5.6 million on increased public awareness campaigns in the latter part of 2023 and beginning 2024 and on commencing a review of the driver testing curriculum”. It is understood this sum came entirely from the RSA’s own reserves.
In response to a query from The Irish Times, the RSA said it was in constant contact with the department to progress “activities that can have an immediate impact on road safety in Ireland”.
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