After government abandons plan to make city speed limit 30km/h by default, council returns to slog of doing it bit by bit

Now that this government has abandoned the last government’s plan to introduce a default speed limit of 30km/h in built-up urban areas, Dublin City Council is returning to its previous approach of slowly lowering speeds on city streets bit by bit. 

“Our hope had been that there would be a default speed limit of 30kph in built-up urban areas,” said the council’s head of traffic, Brendan O’Brien, at a meeting on 12 November of the council’s transport committee. 

However, the Department of Transport, under Minister Darragh O’Brien, a Fianna Fáil TD, indicated to councils in June that it would not be bringing in 30kph as a default speed limit in built-up urban areas.

So, at the meeting yesterday, council managers laid out their plan to go back to their previous strategy of pursuing that goal little by little. And they explained what the process would be. It is lengthy. 

The aim is to bring the changes to councillors for approval in maybe October 2026, and then have everything completed by the end of March 2027, said Jennifer McGrath, senior executive engineer at the council, at the meeting.   

Meanwhile, the default speed limit in the city will remain 50kph. 

Reducing speed limits makes roads safer for the people using them. 

If a driver hits a pedestrian with a car at 50 km/h there’s about a 30 percent chance the pedestrian will die. At 30km/h, the risk of a fatality is reduced six-fold: dropping to 5 percent, according to a 2023 report for the Road Safety Authority (RSA).

While the number of road deaths annually has dropped dramatically in Ireland over the past two decades, it’s been rising again recently, O’Brien, the Transport Minister, said in the Dáil in February. 

“Three of the last four years have seen an annual increase in road-related fatalities and serious injuries,” he said.

In a 16 October press release announcing it would not reduce the default speed limit in urban areas to 30km/h, but would instead leave it to councils to make changes bit by bit, the Department of Transport quoted the Minister on the importance of lowering speed limits.

“Having lower speed limits in built-up and urban areas will greatly improve road safety, especially for those who walk, scoot or cycle,” it quotes O’Brien as saying.

Government turnabout

The 2020 programme for government pledged to “Review and reduce speed limits”.  

A working group was set up, co-chaired by the Department of Transport and the Road Safety Authority, to perform the review. 

In September 2023, the Department of Transport announced that, based on the review, it planned to bring in lower speed limits, by default – including 30km/h in urban areas.

The necessary legislative changes were included in the Road Traffic Act 2024, which the president signed into law in April of that year.

That was all under the previous government, of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party, with the Greens’ Eamon Ryan as Minister for Transport. 

Then, in the November 2024 general election, the Greens were nearly wiped out of the Dáil. When the next government was formed, they weren’t part of it. 

The first phase of rolling out the new default speed limits still came into effect on 7 February 2025: lowering the default speed limit on many rural local roads from 80 km/h to 60 km/h. 

Then, under a roadmap outlined by the Department of Transport, a second phase was to follow: reducing the default speed limit in urban core areas from to 30 km/h by 30 June of this year.

However, at a 26 June local area committee meeting in Fingal, it became clear that that was not going to happen.

Labour Councillor John Walsh said he and other councillors on the area committee had been “gobsmacked that the process has been changed at this late stage.”

Although it had been the plan to introduce the urban 30km/h default speed limit nationally, “it was subsequently recognised that this would be difficult to achieve, as there is presently no definition of an urban area in legislation for the purpose of setting speed limits”, a spokesperson for the Department of Transport said at the time. 

“To introduce a default speed limit of 30km/h in all urban areas would necessitate updated legislation, which would take time,” the spokesperson said. 

So, instead, they came up with a different plan, which they detailed in a 16 October circular, and announced in the press release of the same day. 

“Speed limit changes will be implemented by local authorities, through the adoption of ‘special speed limit bye-laws’, rather than by changing default limits,” the press release says. 

“This approach recognises the positive and important role local authorities, and the elected members, fulfil in setting speed limits in urban areas,” it says. 

“It will allow local authority engineers, who are familiar with the roads and traffic conditions in their administrative areas, to review the existing speed limits and recommend changes where appropriate,” it says.

Back to the old way

This all means a return to the previous method of lowering speed limits, which Dublin City Council had been pursuing for many years.

The Road Traffic Act 2024 enables the government to bring in the new default, Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose said at the transport committee meeting on Wednesday. “They are not enacting it, but that is their choice that they have made,” he said.

McGrath, the council engineer, said similar: “Importantly, while the 2024 Road Traffic Act includes a provision for a default 30 kilometre per hour speed limit, this section has not been enacted by the Minister.”

So after a pause on efforts to lower speed limits, waiting on government promises to bring in the default, the council will go back and do it itself, Jose said, but “we have lost about three or four years”. 

The work plan that McGrath, the engineer, presented at Wednesday’s committee meeting involves assessing all roads in the Dublin City Council area with speed limits of 50km/h and above. 

The council will be looking at the “characteristics of the street, including primary land use and surrounding environment, determining if there are schools, businesses, residential”, the work plan says.

Through this process, the council will identify roads suitable for lower speed limits – either 30km/h, or, for pedestrianised streets that allow motor vehicle access for deliveries during certain hours, 20km/h.

Then council staff will draft new bye-laws including these new speed limits, and bring them to the city’s five local area committees. Once those area committees approve them, the draft bye-laws will go to the full council. 

If/when the full council approves them, they’ll go out for non-statutory public consultation “to gather feedback and ensure community support”. They’ll be revised based on feedback, and then go back to the area committees. 

Then the plans will be put out for statutory public consultation, and then a final vote by the full council. If the new bye-laws make it through that whole process, it’ll be time to put up new signs with the new speed limits. 

However, this won’t cover all the roads in the city. 

Some roads will need to be physically altered to encourage cars to drive more slowly on them, before it would make sense to lower the speed limit, and that’ll have to be done before the speed limits are lowered through this process, the work plan says. 

The government’s guidelines on lowering speed limits, “really call on us to only change speed limits to 30 where the speed at the moment is more or less 30, or else take some action to actually bring the speed down”, said O’Brien, the council’s traffic chief.

As part of this whole process, could the council please look at lowering speed limits even on arterial roads where the speed limit will remain 50km/h, when they pass through urban villages? asked Jose, the Green Party councillor. 

In places like Doyle’s Corner, or Glasnevin village, “or any of those kind of urban villages”, could the speed limit drop to 30km/h for about 100m, and then go back up to 50km/h? he asked.

McGrath, the council engineer, seemed to favour the proposal. “We will be looking at those absolutely,” she said.

Why all the public consultation?

At Wednesday’s meeting, Jason Cullen, a representative of the Dublin Commuter Coalition who sits on the council transport committee, questioned the need to “ensure community support” for changes, as set out in the proposed work plan. 

“We’re talking about road safety here, not whether we should have a bench or a bin in a park, people are dying on the roads,” Cullen said.

“Ensuring community support for whether we reduce speed limits to 30, I don’t think that language really is appropriate within this work plan proposal and I ask that it’d be taken out,” he said.    

Social Democrats Councillor Paddy Monahan also questioned the rounds of public consultation proposed in the work plan. 

“When you’re talking about safety, I just don’t really see where that fits in,” Monahan said. “Either it’s appropriate or not to introduce this as a public safety measure.”

Those rounds of public consultation, and effort to ensure community support, are in there, basically, to avoid what happened in 2020, said council traffic chief Brendan O’Brien.

By that point, the council had been lowering speed limits bit by bit for years, going through four rounds of speed limit reviews, O’Brien said. 

In September of that year, council managers took a plan to lower speed limits to 30km/h on most roads in the city to councillors at their monthly meeting. 

The new bye-laws were set to reduce the default speed limit down to 30kmph with the exception of some named roads.

But Fine Gael’s Naoise Ó Muirí – then a councillor, now a TD – proposed an amendment to the report. In some parts of Dublin, outside of the canals, a 40kmph speed limit might be more appropriate, he said.

“We run a real risk of frustrating some drivers and criminalising them by bringing in a blanket 30kmph across the board,” said Ó Muirí.

Ó Muirí suggested that the local area committees should employ local knowledge to decide if certain roads in the area should be 40kmph.

Most councillors said they agreed on the principle of reducing speed – but several councillors said they find it practically difficult to drive at under 30kmph.

Then-Fianna Fáil Councillor Deirdre Conroy said that sometimes her car cuts out in second gear when driving less than 30kmph.

The law agent, an internal legal advisor within the council, said that the report in question couldn’t be amended.

If the councillors decided to make changes then a whole new plan will have to be created and that would require another public consultation, she said.

Still, 32 councillors voted in favour of the amendment, and 18 against. So the bye-laws as a whole fell, and the speed-limit reductions were not made.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the transport committee, O’Brien, the council’s head of traffic, pointed to this as a reason to take time, ensure public support, do rounds of public consultation, and only bring something to the council that has broad support. 

Legally, “at the end of the process if the city councillors decide that they don’t like some part of it, and vote to change any element of it, the bye-laws fall”, he said. 

“Which is what happened the last time, and we have to go back through the entire process,” O’Brien said. “So when people ask us, why is this a long process, don’t look at us, okay?”