The death of Grace Lynch in Finglas has reignited the debate about regulations and enforcement of the use of scramblers and e-scooters in public places.
But there is much uncertainty about what, precisely, needs to be done.
Ireland’s debate about e-scooters, scramblers and other forms of micromobility has become strangely unmoored from reality. We seem to oscillate between claims that “there are no laws” and counterclaims that “the laws already exist but are unenforced”. The result is widespread confusion, a public terrain that feels increasingly lawless and a policing system that is stretched thin, amid a mounting toll of injuries that medical professionals have been warning about for years.
To understand how Ireland arrived here, it helps to separate the existence of rules from the State’s enforcement capacity in practice.
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Since May 2024, the State has legalised e-scooters that meet specific technical criteria by creating a new legal category of “powered personal transporters”. Under this framework, compliant e-scooters are permitted on public roads and cycle lanes, subject to strict conditions, including that riders must be at least 16 years old; speed is capped at 20km/h; scooters are prohibited on footpaths; and they must obey the same traffic rules as cyclists.
And yet, despite these existing regulations, Ireland’s streets increasingly feel like a Wild West. However, the problem is not actually an absence of law, but an absence of visible, consistent enforcement, combined with the coexistence of several different categories of vehicles that are socially lumped together but are in fact legally distinct.
First, there are compliant e-scooters, which are legal only when used in accordance with the rules. In practice, they are frequently ridden illegally on footpaths at excessive speeds by underage riders, or with passengers. These behaviours are explicitly prohibited, yet are rarely sanctioned.
Second, there are devices that resemble e-scooters but fall outside the legal specifications because they are too powerful, too heavy or modified, and which remain illegal in public spaces despite being widely used.
Third, there are scramblers, quad bikes and high-powered off-road dirt bikes. Unlike the first two, these are not micromobility devices at all. Scramblers and quads were never designed to operate on public roads, footpaths or parks. In the vast majority of cases, they do not comply with vehicle standards and are permitted for off-road use on private property only.
From a distance, all of these may appear similar, but from a legal and enforcement perspective, they are entirely different problems. Scramblers may only be used in public spaces if they are registered with a number plate, insured, taxed and driven by a licensed driver over the age of 16. But here’s the rub – to have them registered, they would have to be modified extensively to the point where they would more closely resemble a motorbike.
In most cases of collisions and injuries involving scramblers, the problem is not a legislative lag or regulatory uncertainty, but a deeper failure of the State to remove clearly illegal vehicles from the street.
Naturally, behaviour adapts to the likelihood of enforcement – which in Ireland, in practice, is low.
This is why Ireland’s streets feel chaotic; because legal vehicles operate illegally while largely illegal vehicles operate as if they are legal. Both, in fact, are responding to the same enforcement vacuum.
Part of the reason this vacuum persists lies in how scramblers are framed. In Ireland, their use is often treated as a form of antisocial behaviour instead of as a road-safety issue, deeming them a nuisance instead of a transport threat. This framing has long-standing consequences, as once behaviour is classified as antisocial rather than dangerous, enforcement becomes discretionary, complaint-driven and episodic. In this way, it must compete with every other form of low-level disorder for limited Garda attention.
As we are seeing, this is a poor labelling for vehicles capable of serious harm. Scramblers are fast, heavy machines operating in spaces designed for pedestrians and families. Treating them as nuisances rather than as unregistered motor vehicles shifts them into the least enforceable corner of the policing system. It also helps explain the pattern that we see today of brief enforcement surges after serious incidents, followed by a rapid return to the status quo.
In the wake of Grace Lynch’s death, the Government is planning an outright ban on scramblers in public places, and further prohibitions on e-scooters.
Other countries offer a revealing contrast in their response. The UK, France and the Netherlands all prohibit the use of scramblers on roads, footpaths and parks. But the difference lies in how seriously this risk is treated. In British cities, scrambler use is framed as a public-safety threat, with routine seizure and visible destruction of vehicles. In France, repeat illegal use triggers criminal penalties. In the Netherlands, private e-scooters were not permitted on public roads at all until 2025, when only approved models with registration and licence plates were permitted. Enforcement is reinforced through physical design that makes riding them impossible in the first place.
Ireland already has broadly similar legal powers, but what it lacks is consistent and visible execution of such powers.
It is in this context that recent calls for new powers, including proposals for amnesty periods allowing scramblers to be voluntarily surrendered, should be treated with caution. Gardaí already have powers to seize illegal vehicles, which includes scramblers operating without a licence plate, tax and insurance.
However, the problem is an absence of routine enforcement. Amnesty schemes rely on goodwill, when what is required is credible deterrence. They do little to correct a system in which clearly illegal vehicles are able to operate openly for long periods without intervention.
This enforcement gap is not confined to micromobility. On roads policing more generally, deterrence signals have been weakening. Fixed-charge notices for speeding have fallen in recent years, even as speeding prevalence remains high by European standards and road fatalities rise rather than fall. At the same time, the number of gardaí assigned to roads policing is significantly lower than it was a decade ago. When enforcement thins, behaviour adapts accordingly, and tolerance becomes the default condition.
The medical consequences have been visible for some time. Emergency consultants and trauma specialists have repeatedly warned about the injury patterns associated with e-scooters and scramblers including head injuries, facial trauma, fractures and a disproportionate impact on children and teenagers. These warnings were public and sustained; but they have been largely ignored.
The State should publish a clear national enforcement doctrine covering both micromobility and off-road vehicles, spelling out priorities, consequences and expectations. Enforcement must be routine and predictable, not reactive. Local authorities must recognise that street design can be a form of enforcement itself. And Ireland must begin looking at the data for the bigger picture: including vehicle seizures, collisions, hospital admissions and outcomes.
This week should not be remembered as the moment Ireland “realised” these vehicles were dangerous, because that has been long known. It should be remembered as the moment it was acknowledged that regulation without enforcement is not regulation at all.
Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School, where she served as head of strategy of the HBS Institute for Strategy
