309. Deputy Pat Buckley asked the Minister for Transport when the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill 2025 will be published, given that the Minister of State stated in May 2025 that it would be enacted by year-end; the interim measures in place to provide local authority road engineers with access to collision location data, given that such data has not been shared since 2020 and the Data Protection Commission stated in April 2024 that GDPR should not prevent sharing anonymised crash location data; and to provide the number of fatal and serious injury collisions that have occurred on regional and local roads managed by local authorities in each year from 2019 to 2025 inclusive. [18224/26]

The General Scheme of the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill 2025 has been approved by Government and is with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel for drafting. The passage of this Bill is a Programme for Government commitment and will amend the Roads Act 1993 to provide a basis for the resumption of direct sharing of road traffic collision data with local authorities. The Bill will be published in the coming weeks with enactment targeted for the first half of 2026.

Collision data are collected by members of An Garda Síochána at the scene of road traffic accidents. These data were previously shared with local authorities, to enable them to identify locations of interest (accident blackspots) that would benefit from safety improvements. Due to the presence of personal information in the data, legal advice related to GDPR has meant that local authorities have stopped receiving collision data since November 2023. As an interim measure, the Department of Transport has been undertaking detailed collision analysis on the regional and local road network to identify locations of interest. When locations of interest are identified, the Department notifies the affected local authority. In turn, local authorities can apply for funding of low-cost safety schemes for these locations of interest.

Data provided by the Road Safety Authority on fatal and serious injury collisions are set out in the tables below.

Fatal collisions

Serious injury collisions