DUBLIN CITY COUNCILLORS expressed outrage, frustration and at times incredulity today at the fact that the Road Safety Authority has not provided local councils with data on collisions and injuries for the last seven years. 

Many of the members of Dublin City Council’s Mobility and the Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee this afternoon described the situation regarding the lack of data from the RSA as “unacceptable”, asking how many times the national road safety body has been asked for its figures since it stopped providing them in 2018. 

The chair of the committee, Green Party councillor Janet Horner, told The Journal the RSA was “an absolute sham of an organisation”.

The RSA does provide councils with the number of fatalities on roads, but not on collisions and injuries. 

Horner told the committee today that when she initially asked the body for an explanation for this years ago, she was told there were data privacy concerns. 

She said the RSA’s inaction was “wholly unacceptable” and that it was “in no way living up to its responsibility”. 

She also questioned the excuse she got from the RSA at the time, which was that providing the data would breach GDPR regulations, the EU rules that govern the protection of personal information.

Other councillors questioned how it could be an issue when the data would be anonymised.  

Councillors complained that it is not possible to make evidence-based policy decisions without the RSA data, particularly when it comes to identifying problem areas in the city. 

The committee also heard that this was not just a Dublin problem, but that no county or city councils had received RSA data since 2018.

Lord Mayor Ray McAdam said the situation was “utterly unacceptable” and that he would raise it with the minister for transport. 

Following today’s committee meeting, Horner told The Journal that the RSA should be abolished, something she has called for in the past, because “it is not working in its current form” and that it has made the provision of drivers licenses its main area of attention. 

She said the situation regarding data not being supplied to councils as “completely mad” and that the RSA was an “absolute sham of an organisation”. 

“The attitude from them is terrible as well,” she said.

She said that the RSA has not taken engagement with the council seriously and failed to respond to written requests for explanations. 

It has also failed to send representatives to the committee on mobility on many occasions.

“They either don’t come to it or they send a different person every time,” she said, explaining that this means no progress is made represented because the officials are not up to speed. 

The government announced in November last year that the RSA would be disbanded and split into two separate bodies. 

The RSA has been asked for comment.