The list of the most dangerous roads in the State released last week was incomplete, and excluded all the collision zones in one county, it has emerged.
Initially released to one newspaper, the list revealed the locations of 975 "collision-prone zones" identified by gardaí and the National Roads Authority, each categorised by colour: red for the most dangerous, amber for medium risk and green for low risk.
However, all references to Limerick city and county were omitted in error from the list first released by gardaí. There are 20 zones in the county.
Among the areas omitted include the N21 from Adare to Rathkeale and the N69 from Dock Road to Ferrybridge.
When the data for Limerick is included, there are in fact 995 "collision-prone zones" in the Republic, out of which 407 are red zones, which are the stretches of road with the highest risk.
This is seven higher than the figure originally reported last week. Each zone is an eight-kilometre section of road where there has been a fatal crash, or a road user sustained a serious injury during the last eight to ten years.
Red zones are going to be used by gardaí when they select areas to site private speed cameras when they come on stream after March next year.
Conor Faughnan, a spokesman with AA Ireland, welcomed publication of the collision zones list, but said it has many imperfections, aside from the initial omission of Limerick.
"Using deaths can be a crude mechanism for measurement. For example, the classic one is the Stillorgan road. That road had four deaths over the eight-year time period, classifying it as a red zone.
"But one incident accounted for two of those deaths. And those one-off incidents don't tell you anything specific about the safety of the road involved."
Mr Faughnan added that there was also some concern over the length of the zones.
"An eight kilometre link in an urban area is unrealistically long, in terms of the setting of the character of the road," he said.
Mr Faughnan said that publishing the list would help gardaí to explain why they were enforcing speed limits at a particular area.
However, he said it was vital that the speed limits being enforced were appropriate to the roads involved, adding that for huge numbers of secondary roads this was not the case.
"The county councils have had a series of deadlines to sort out speed limits in their areas.
"Most of the primary routes have been dealt with but in almost every local authority area there are issues with speed limits on non-national routes."
Mr Faughnan said he believed that councils should be given a deadline of March 2007, shortly before the initial roll-out of the privatised speed cameras to resolve this issue or "the Government must look seriously at centralising responsibility for setting of all speed limits".
The full list of 995 "collision prone-zones" - including those in Co Limerick - is available on The Irish Times website, Ireland.com at www.ireland.com/ newspaper/special/2006/nra
