Donegal accidents and deaths.

As you were typing that myself and the wife were discussing the exact same thing.

Is there actually more, or do you just have a perception that there are more?

• According to the HSA, there was one work-related fatality in Donegal in 2023: https://www.hsa.ie/eng/news_events_media/news/press_releases_2024/health_and_safety_authority_reports_43_work-related_fatalities_in_2023.html
• According to the RSA, there were 10 road deaths in Donegal in 2023: https://www.rsa.ie/news-events/news/details/2024/01/01/road-deaths-in-2023-increase-by-19

Neither of which suggest Donegal as a notable outlier

Obviously no final figures for 2024 yet, but Donegal wasn't even in the Top 5 for last year

and Loveless Leitrim

Let's stop calling road deaths accidents for a start.

Not that said behaviour is ok, but few road deaths/injuries are attributed to people's exhausts being loud and doing donuts in the middle of the night.

The issue by and large is poor road design. Most of the deaths happen in the same spots year after year. Poor sightlines, road markings and a lack of lighting through villages on main roads. Latest death is in Quigley's point as were previous 2? And I think 1 more this year. That road has seen double digits in the past few years combined I believe. It's clearly the road design

Beat me to it, I'd be curious if it isn't similar to 'Florida Man' syndrome (Florida's freedom of info laws make it easy for low-effort journalism to crawl vast public records), in this case where journalists in Donegal simply may be having a tendency to consider it newsworthy and make reports on it more frequently than other counties. In other words a reporting/publication bias going on.

I'm not sure where last night's fatality took place, bur re: the 2 young Derry lads who died a couple of weeks ago, I've seen bridge they hit and I can't fathom how they hit it. It was a straight bit of road, and I would guess the car simply veered off the road, or the wheel caught the ditch or something and forced them off the road. Why this would happen we might never hear. Perhaps the driver was glancing at a phone? It only takes a second or two of taking your eye off the road for a car to drift off and get into an irrecoverable position.

But I would agree that road design is often an issue, but I'd also agree that it's mostly bad driving that are the cause, and excess speed. If the roads were inherently dangerous, then how come thousands of other drivers manage to drive the same roads without issue?

I think we are too quick to jump on fatalities in this country as someone else's fault. Quite often it's the driver to blame. Plain and simple. They were either not paying attention, driving dangerously or going too fast for the conditions.

I’m from Donegal and we do have an issue with dangerous and aggressive driving imo. Aggressive overtaking, tailgating, speeding, lack of indicators etc.

Only a few weeks back outside Lifford in the middle of the day on a busy road, a northern reg car stopped and started doing doughnuts. I’m not sure of the difference between doughnuts and diffing but they were going round in circles burning up the rubber on their tyres. Cars coming both directions had to stop and wait for them to finish.

Donegal has quite a lot of very, very wide N roads, on which the normal running speed is probably about ~110km/h to begin with, and on which drivers often overtake without checking for oncoming traffic because two cars will fit on one side of the road; if they're positioned for it it. Much of the N13, N14 and N15 are built to this standard.

That driving position (one car half in the hard shoulder, another hugging the centre line) becomes fatal if there's someone pulling out from a junction, someone broken down, etc etc. Have two drivers pushing it beyond what they can get away with and you now have a closing speed of 250km/h or so.

The bad roads are the R/L roads and some bits of the N56. These are not the accident blackspots.

Some of the more runway-alike bits are going to be converted to dual carriageway at some point - basically close up some of the side roads, skim off the top surface, resurface for four driving lanes and put a barrier down the middle - which will have a huge impact.

Driving in Donegal is a death trap. Majority of roads there are designed to kill people.Even those who obey traffic laws Boyracwrs etc don't come into it but includes a lot of the casualties

100% confirmation bias.

Always see this when some young fella is involved in a fatal accident in Donegal. Post straight in about rallying, boy racers. Speeding etc. despite not actually knowing at all what may have caused the accident.

Never a dickie bird when these sort of accidents happen anywhere else in the country.

I say all that as someone with no connections to Donegal.

Fact is the roads have never been busier and quite a few of the old small two lane yet no white line roads are simply too narrow for modern traffic.

No matter what initiatives are brought in road death numbers will creep up in line with population growth.

Yes it has been recently there's been 5 deaths in a month I think.

But before that, Donegal wasn't in the news for a road death in a long time.

Why is there never threads for 'another Mayo road death', or 'another Cork road death'?

Boy racers and idiot drivers aren't exclusive to Donegal. They are all over the country. We have poor quality roads up here too, always remember that. We have no motorways, a dearth of national roads.

They are the worst drivers in the country and there's a certain immatureness that prevails in men behind the wheel in Donegal that seems to leave when they hit around 75 or 80. Any time I'm in Donegal I am shocked at the carry on from all ages. When a "dangerous" road is improved it just means it will be driven faster on it.

I met a 60 year old man from Donegal in France and he was telling me a youngfella "left his mark" up the road from him (did doughnuts & left tyre marks) so he got his BMW and drove up to the spot and did some doughnuts himself, to show the youngfella how it's done. I thought he was joking.

You go ahead and take what you want on all that. I'm not in the habit of making things up like that.

Such stats are meaningless without reference to a 'per kilometres driven' metric.

For example, number of fatalities per 100,000 kilometres.

I'm in Donegal at the moment. Letterkenny, buncrana, downings areas (golf heaven)

The boy racer mentality is crazy especially on inishowen where the prevalence of souped up cars is unbelievable.

Simply zero visibility of Garda. So zero chance of being caught.

I witnessed an atrociously reckless overtaking maneuver by a van on that road today. The car in front was possibly over cautious in not passing a slow vehicle. Van man couldn't wait and passes them both on a bend, expecting traffic on the other side to pull into the hard shoulder.

At grade junctions along that stretch are the problem, merging from the R239 at Inch to the N13 is steep and a blind spot. Both Manor and Newton have high enough traffic levels and barely anyone slows down going through there. It's in good condition but it's not engineered to a standard to handle the amount or speed of traffic.

Its a complete lie and you are complicit in spreading it.

News and radio contradicts your gossip - the other driver was present at the scene and tested for drink & drugs, as confirmed by the local Superintendent.

At grade junctions are the problem for most roads not just in Donegal but nationwide, although Donegal has a very high prevalence of bad junctions on major roads.

The fact that so few roads are National primary or secondary status in Donegal likely doesn't help - the local authority lacks the expertise and the budget to make safe the huge network of R roads serving the county.

As I said, it was probably misinformation and I also corrected the post.

Checked today and the guy said he was talking about a single car accident the previous weekend where the two in the car scarpered.

Why so angry? Boy racers are a scourge in that part of Donegal. There are feck all gardai and this seems to make these scum think they can drive anyway they like without consequence - until they kill or seriously injure someone.