Last year saw the lowest number of recorded deaths since records began 52 years ago, with 186 people dying on our roads.

This number has fallen from a peak of 640 in 1972 to just 186, in a period where the number of cars on the road has more than trebled from about 700,000 to some 2.5 million.

Road Safety chiefs urged drivers to continue to exercise caution and build on the good work that is still being done to further reduce the fatalities on our nation’s roads. According to the Road Safety Authority chief executive, Noel Brett; “There is no one silver bullet,” he says, “it’s like putting together a complex jigsaw; you need to have all the pieces.”

There are 126 measures at the core of the authority’s Road Safety Strategy, introduced in 2007 and everything is based on what Brett calls “the four Es”: education, enforcement, engineering and evaluation.

Road Safety Authority chairman Gay Byrne added that it is “A major watershed, especially when you consider that we have gone from being 27th in Europe to the sixth-best in terms of road safety.”