Wexford named Ireland's penalty point capital

What does that mean?

Good question. Insurance broker Quote Devil analysed the data from the RSA and CSO and broke it down county by county in an effort to find the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ Irish counties when it comes to road safety. Of course, that’s something of a crude statistic and it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Why not?

Well, you could look at the bald figures, which state that Dublin, with 120,059 drivers with penalty points, is the worst county for road safety because it has the largest number of drivers with points. That, of course, is silly — Dublin also has the largest population, with the highest population density, so proportionally it’s no worse off in terms of the number of drivers with penalty points than, say, Cavan, which is far more sparsely populated. The actual percentage of total licensed drivers with penalty points stands at just over 13 per cent for both counties.

So Dublin’s not the worst?

No, not by a long shot — and, to be honest, there’s really no best or worst here because the figures don’t tell the full story at all. So much of this is down to enforcement levels as well, because you can only get penalty points when you’re caught by a Garda or a mobile camera. The percentage of drivers with points is therefore heavily dependent on the number of Gardaí and cameras on the road in a given county at any particular time.

So is there any meaning to these figures?

Not particularly. For what it’s worth, the county with the lowest proportional number of drivers with points is Louth, with 10.91 per cent. Next ‘best’ is Leitrim (11.85 per cent), followed by Donegal (12.25 per cent), Cork (12.30 per cent), Roscommon (12.38 per cent), Meath (12.55 per cent), Monaghan (12.8 per cent), Kerry (13 per cent), Cavan (13.16 per cent) and Dublin (13.29 per cent).

And which are the ‘worst’?

According to these figures, the worst-performing county is Wexford, with 21.43 per cent of drivers having points on their licences. Next worst is Carlow (19.31 per cent), followed by Waterford (17.81 per cent), Laois (17.3 per cent), Kilkenny (16.28 per cent), Offaly (16.12 per cent), Tipperary (15.88 per cent), Wicklow (15.58 per cent), Kildare (15.09 per cent) and Longford (15.05 per cent).

What are people getting penalty points for?

Most points are, perhaps unsurprisingly, for speeding or mobile phone use. There are some county-by-county oddities, though. Louth and Monaghan have the highest rates of uninsured drivers (2.25 per cent and 2.07 per cent respectively, with Cavan relatively high in that regard at 1.86 per cent). Cork, Limerick and Wexford are the hotspots for driving without a seatbelt (and yes, we too were amazed that it’s 2026 and people are still not belting up. What’s wrong with us?).

So, have we learned anything?

Not especially, beyond the bald statistic that 513,000 drivers currently have points on their licences. The county league table is really something of an invention — it doesn’t take into account traffic volumes, road types or, crucially, the level of enforcement and the number of Gardaí or enforcement cameras in use, a factor that will dramatically skew the results.

The really important figure is that, despite 513,000 drivers having penalty points, 144 people have died on Irish roads this year, which perhaps suggests that the penalty points system is doing rather less than was hoped.