NEWS OF TRAGIC deaths on Irish roads has been met by some who have mistakenly blamed fatalities on an unusual target: environmental policies.

“The Green New Deal is the main cause of deaths on Irish roads,” reads a 16 November post on the Facebook page of Kieran Kelly, an Irish political activist and self-described “Trump loyalist” who made news during the recent Irish presidential election for sharing misinformation about one candidate.

The Green New Deal can refer to programmes aimed at creating an environmentally sustainable quality of life for citizens.

Most recently, it has included proposed US legislation championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the European Green Deal, which passed the EU parliament in 2020.

In a video posted to Facebook on 17 November, Kelly explained his reasons for blaming such policies for road deaths.

“We have to look at what exactly is causing these accidents, and why the Green New Deal is actually responsible for many of these deaths,” Kelly says in a video that has been viewed more than 14,000 times since being posted on Facebook on 17 November.

“If you look at the push they have regarding reducing carbon emissions and all this nonsense that’s been pushed on people — putting people into smaller and smaller cars — forcing them in there,” he says.

“They made the cars a lot lighter: fiberglass and plastic bodies. There’s no real metal in the cars. The cars just fold up like a can of Coca Cola. They’ll fold up on impact, and people are dying because of that,” Kelly says.

Car crumple zones are an intentional safety feature that work by absorbing impact energy during a crash so that it is dissipated away from passengers.

The time it takes to crumple the front of the car also means that the change in momentum during the crash is slower, reducing the force exerted on humans inside the car.

“The government keeps pushing this narrative that carbon emissions are such a big deal,” Kelly continues. “So the auto industry has been pushed for years to make smaller, lighter cars.”

Although Kelly appears to have misunderstood how crumple zones work, is there anything in the core of his argument that is true? Are cars getting lighter? Are there more road deaths? And is the allegedly smaller size of cars causing the an increase in deaths?

Road deaths

The first claim made by Kelly is that road deaths are increasing.

Is that correct? In the short term: yes.

Statistics going back to 1959 show that, in Ireland, road deaths had gradually been falling since the 1990s, down to a low of 132 in 2021. Since then, they have risen again and increased to 172 last year, according to provisional figures.

At the end of October, there were 141 fatalities on Irish roads in 2025 — matching the death toll as it stood at the end of October 2024.

Of the dead, 56 were drivers and 13 were passengers.

However, many of these fatalities weren’t people who died in cars at all. 29 were pedestrians, 28 were motorcyclists, 13 were cyclists, and 2 were e-scooter users, according to the Road Safety Authroity (RSA).

So, if there has been an increase in road deaths since 2021, is this due to a Green New Deal putting smaller cars on Irish roads?

Car sizes

The claim that increased road fatalities are due to smaller cars should be puzzling to anyone familiar with Irish roads.

Cars in Ireland are getting substantially bigger.

The Journal has previously reported how new cars in Ireland grew 2.4cm wider in five years, while car bonnets are growing taller by half a centimetre a year. And with this increase in size, so too grows the risk of collision.

“The average family car in Ireland today isn’t a compact hatchback any more. It’s a crossover SUV,” Done Deal’s Paddy Comyn wrote last week in The Journal, noting that this larger weight, which often comprises additional safety features, is all transferred into force during a crash.

Research from road tests by UK magazine Autocar found that, in the seven years to 2023, the average weight of new cars rose from 1,553kg to 1,947kg — a weight increase which is roughly equivalent to that of a grand piano.

Although this data was for the UK, it is reflected in Irish figures.

In 2023, the average mass of a new passenger car was 1,574kg, up from 1,550kg the year before that, and 1,504kg the year before that.

In the three years since 2020 — the year that the EU passed a so-called Green Deal — the average weight of a passenger car in Ireland rose from 1,438kg to 1,574kg, according to the International Council of Clean Transportation, a non-profit think tank.

This means, in just three years, that the average car now carries more than the equivalent weight of an adult giant panda.

And this trend has been ongoing for a while.

A study by UCC academics found that new vehicles were 330kg heavier in 2022 than 2001 — an increase of 27 percent.

Verdict

Is an increase in road deaths due to environmental regulations making cars smaller?

There has been an increase in road deaths since 2021.

However, this isn’t due to environmental regulations making cars smaller, because cars aren’t getting smaller — they’re getting bigger and heavier.

With the data available, we cannot draw a straight causal connection between this increase in car sizes and the increase in road deaths. However, larger, heavier cars have long been established to increase the risk of fatal crashes.

One American study found that any safety gains from driving in large vehicles are outweighed by the danger caused by the additional speeding mass on the road.

“For each fatal crash that occupants of large vehicles avoid,” the paper found, “at least 4.3 additional fatal crashes involving others occur.”

The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.