SEÁN CANNEY, MINISTER of State with responsibility for roads, has said he will be pressing officials at the departments of transport and justice to give him a date by which regulation of scrambler bikes can be expected.

There has been public outrage over the death of 16-year-old Grace Lynch, who was hit by a scrambler bike in Finglas, Dublin, on Sunday. 

The Taoiseach has been among those to pay tributes to the teenager after her death, offering his sympathies to her family.

“I will be engaging with ministers to make sure that anything and everything that has to be done will be done to remove these scramblers from our public roads,” he wrote on social media.

Grace’s mother Siobhan led the calls for stricter regulation of scrambler bikes when members of the local community gathered in Finglas yesterday evening. 

“I will fight to get these scramblers and scooters and everything off these streets,” she said, adding that watching her daughter “take her last breath was the worst pain imaginable”.

“It’s not something that any parent should have to deal with,” she said as she pledged to launch a campaign.

Speaking to RTÉ Radio this morning, Canney was asked by part of legislation passed in 2023 has yet to be implemented in the form of regulation.

The specific part of the legislation relates to the restriction of the use of scramblers in certain areas. 

“That’s a regulation, and that’s being worked on by my department,” Canney said.

He said it was also being worked on by officials at the Department of Justice, “and I’ve been on to them yesterday, and I want a date, an early date, by which this regulation is in place”.

Asked why there has been such a long delay, Canney said: “I’ve been there for the last 12 months, and I’ve been trying to get things enacted.”

“So we will be working on this. We have a lot of legislation, but there’s no point in having legislation if the necessary regulation isn’t there with it.

“So I will be talking to my officials again this morning to try and extract a date, because we need a date and I think we owe it to the community in Finglas and we owe it to the public that we get this regulation in place as quickly as possible.”

He also noted that there is already legislation in place to deal with the dangerous driving of scramblers. 

“The legislation there already, which came in in 2023, says dangerous driving becomes an offence on any ground, not just in a public place – it is any place,” he said.

“Also that gardaí have the power to seize the offending machines.”

Asked where they should be banned, he said: “Scramblers should not be permissioned in any public space in this country, I fail to see why we need to have them in public spaces.”

He said this “absolutely” included roads.

Pressed on whether this belief would be in the regulations drawn up by Government officials, he said he would be looking at the matter “very closely” with his officials.

Canney said gardaí and the Department of Justice are working on a code of practice for the use of drones to track scramblers to make sure it is “foolproof” against legal objections.

The independent TD added that he had instructed local authorities to introduce bylaws to reduce speed limits in urban areas from 50kmh to 30kmh by the end of the year.

He also said that the number of “these dangerous vehicles” seized by gardaí in the last year has gone up.

“In 2025, they seized 113 scramblers and 22 quad bikes,” he said, adding that “enforcement is happening, maybe not as much as we would like”.