Drink-driving: If your chance of being caught is 1 in 77, where is the deterrent?

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ALCOHOL ACTION IRELAND appeared before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport this week to make the case for urgent action on drink-driving. It was not the first time it has done so.

While committees sit and ministers nod, the numbers keep getting worse.

183 people were killed on Irish roads in 2025.

That is the highest toll since 2014, and a 39% increase in just three years. According to An Garda Síochána, 59 people have been killed so far in 2026 (as of 14 May) — the same figure as at this point last year. In a year when we should be seeing improvement, we are running level with one of the worst years in over a decade.

We know alcohol is a central factor.

The RSA’s own coronial data shows that 35% of drivers killed between 2016 and 2020 had alcohol in their systems.

At night, between 10pm and 6am, that figure is 70%. They are the RSA’s own numbers. And yet our response to them has been, by any objective measure, to do less.

In 2010, there were 2.65 million driving licences in Ireland. Gardaí carried out 566,760 roadside breath tests that year and made 10,308 arrests.

In 2025, there were 3.54 million licences, nearly a million more people with access to the roads. Breath tests had fallen to 189,736. Arrests to 4,867.

More drivers. Two thirds fewer tests. Half the arrests.

Gardaí pointed to a 5% increase in drink-driving detections last year as evidence of progress. A 5% increase on a baseline that has collapsed by two-thirds in 15 years is not a meaningful trend. It is a footnote.

If you drink drive in Ireland tonight, according to Alcohol Action Ireland your chance of being caught is approximately 1.3%, or 1 in 77. For context, CSO survey data suggests that 2.6% of adults were involved in a road traffic collision in the previous 12 months — roughly 1 in 38 people.

In other words, Irish adults may now be statistically more likely to be involved in a road collision than to be stopped for a breath test. And three in four Irish drivers already know this, as the RSA’s own surveys show that most people consider it unlikely or very unlikely they will be tested on a typical journey.

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This is not an accident of resources. It is a failure of ambition. No mandatory testing target has ever been set in Ireland. Australia has one. Their aim is that every licensed driver should expect to be tested once a year. The result? Alcohol is present in 14% of Australian driver fatalities. In Ireland it is 35%.

The EU’s worst performer

Ireland carries out 18 roadside breath tests per 1,000 inhabitants. France does 109. Estonia, which leads the EU, does 576.

We are not slightly behind the European average. We are last. Bottom of the table. In a country where around 424,500 people — roughly 1 in 8 of all drivers — admit to drink-driving in the past 12 months. That figure, by the way, is up from 1 in 11 in 2021. The problem is getting worse as the enforcement gets weaker.

At the committee hearing, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman went further than the statistics. Having read the Crowe Report on road policing, he said he found some attitudes among gardaí towards breath testing “quite alarming”.

Dr Sheila Gilheany, CEO of Alcohol Action Ireland, was diplomatic in response. The evidence, she said, points to a lack of resources, but also to a general acceptance in Ireland around alcohol.

Both things can be true.

Who is actually being stopped?

Professor Denis Cusack, director of the Medical Bureau of Road Safety at UCD, presented the MBRS’s 2024 data at the RSA’s Annual International Conference last June. The numbers are stark.

The median blood alcohol level of those arrested was 142mg per 100ml. The legal limit is 50mg. That is not someone who misjudged a pint, it is nearly three times the limit, a level Cusack’s own clinical scale classifies as producing slurred speech and a staggered gait.

The highest single reading recorded in 2024 was 427mg. That is 8.5 times the legal limit.

85% of those arrested are male. Half are under 35. The youngest person arrested for drink-driving in 2024 was 14 years old. In 644 cases last year, alcohol was found alongside at least one other drug — most commonly cannabis or cocaine. This has long since stopped being purely a drink-driving problem.

Here is the statistic that should be driving policy, and largely isn’t. A hardcore 10% of drink-driving offenders are responsible for two thirds of all alcohol-related road crashes. According to Cusack’s data, 80% of first-time offenders have a clinically diagnosable Alcohol Use Disorder. By the time someone is before the courts for the third time, that figure is 98%. 263 drivers were arrested twice in 2024 alone, up 8% on the previous year.

You cannot enforce your way out of a dependency.

For this group, more checkpoints will not change behaviour because rational deterrence stopped working long ago. What they need is treatment, rehabilitation and technology that physically prevents them from starting the car if they have drink taken.

Ireland has fewer than 9,000 people accessing alcohol treatment each year despite an estimated 500,000 living with Alcohol Use Disorder. The gap between the scale of the problem and the scale of the response is enormous.

The interlock that Ireland won’t introduce

Alcohol ignition interlock devices, which require a clean breath test before the engine will start, have been used in Sweden since 1999. Belgium introduced an offender programme in 2013. France, Finland, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Lithuania all have them. The RSA commissioned its own cost-benefit analysis in 2020, which found that every €1 spent on an Irish interlock programme would return €6.10.

The Medical Bureau of Road Safety has now approved four devices for use in Ireland. A working group has reported. Minister Seán Canney said in February that “nothing is off the table, such as an alcohol interlocker”.

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Nothing is off the table. In 2026. Twenty-seven years after Sweden introduced them.

Between 2020 and 2023, 37.74% of drink-driving cases that went to court were dismissed entirely. More than one in three. Dismissed.

Dr Eoin Fogarty, a consultant in Emergency Medicine at Cork University Hospital, told the committee what happens after an arrest. The driver sobers up. Gardaí hand them back the keys.

“It is mind-boggling,” he said. “But that is what happens in Ireland.”

So the complete picture is this: a 1.3% chance of being stopped. A fixed penalty option at lower BAC levels that carries no conviction. A court process that throws out over a third of the cases that reach it. And a procedure around blood samples after collisions is so cumbersome with a three-hour window, a garda-directed doctor, a chain of evidence that can easily be broken, that serious offenders walk free after crashes that put people in hospital.

Dr Gilheany told the committee that in Australia, any doctor in an emergency department can take a blood sample and store it appropriately.

In Ireland, gardaí must direct a specific doctor to do so, within three hours of the driver last having control of the vehicle. AAI is calling for that window to be extended to 12 hours. In a country where rural roads can be an hour or more from the nearest hospital, the three-hour limit is not a legal safeguard. It is an escape route.

What needs to change

The asks from Alcohol Action Ireland are not that radical. Set a mandatory breath testing target and resource it properly. Extend the window for taking blood samples after collisions from three hours to 12. Allow any emergency department doctor or nurse to collect those samples. Impound vehicles at the point of a failed breath test — the same way we do for uninsured drivers. Introduce interlock devices for serious and repeat offenders, paired with mandatory treatment referral.

And raise excise duty on alcohol. This one is unlikely to gain much support in a country where we pay more for pretty much everything than our neighbours. EU research shows a 10% increase in alcohol prices is associated with a 7% reduction in road deaths. Given Ireland already is one of the most expensive countries in Europe for alcohol, one guesses this might not be the issue.

The government’s target is fewer than 72 road deaths per year by 2030. We had 183 last year. There is no credible path to that target without meaningful action on alcohol. None.

183 people.

Over a third of them dying in crashes where alcohol was a factor.

We know why it is happening. We know how to reduce it. The only question left is whether we are willing to. 

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years.

Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with DoneDeal Ltd

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