394,128 learner drivers on Irish roads a ‘road safety crisis’
Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA) president Ger Hyland said the levels of inexperienced drivers on the roads “beggars belief”.
New figures released from the Road Safety Authority (RSA) reveal that there were 394,128 learner permit holders on Irish roads at the end of September.
That is an increase of 12,257 learner drivers on Irish roads since March of this year. Hyland has described this as a road safety crisis.
As of November 20, 2025, garda figures show that 158 people had lost their lives on Irish roads so far this year, nine more deaths than on the same day in 2024.
Surge in learner permits
Hyland said that the surge in learner drivers on our roads poses a direct threat to Irish road safety.
He said: “To have 394,128 inexperienced drivers on our roads is a testament to the failure of the RSA and their mismanagement of our driver testing system.
“It is a mess and not getting any better, despite all the creative accounting that the RSA are doing with driver testing figures.”
Hyland said that the IRHA no longer has confidence in the data provided by the RSA.
“How are we supposed to accept that around 10% of Ireland’s driving public are on some kind of learner permit?” he asked.
“We have been asking questions of the RSA for the past 12 months on behalf of our members and the driving public.
"The RSA have ducked, dived and dodged accountability and transparency, and it is high time that Minister Sean Canney called them to task.”
Dublin has the highest numbers of learner permit holders (122,544), followed by Cork (43,511) and Kildare (19,837).
“The Irish Road Haulage Industry has indicated that it no longer holds confidence in the RSA nor the figures they continue to present around driver testing,” Hyland said.
The RSA figures show that the largest cohort of learner drivers (96,130) are between the ages of 30-39, while 90,688 learner drivers were between 17-20-years-of-age.
