In the 1980s, the British government’s “don’t die of ignorance” public health campaign about the emerging Aids epidemic seemed to be on every time you turned on the television. The ad campaign was crude and unsophisticated: shot in the grainy black and white of a sci-fi movie, it featured volcanoes, tombstones, a chisel chipping away at granite, and an ominous voiceover by John Hurt. In the final frame, a bunch of lilies are tossed unceremoniously onto a fallen headstone. At one point, there had been talk of possibly opening it with the sound of a nuclear warning siren – a suggestion then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher wisely over-ruled. It was sensationalist, unforgettable and brutal. And it was brutally effective. Leaflets were sent to 23 million homes; the purpose of the TV campaign was to make sure people read them. Later research suggested 98 per cent of the British public understood how HIV was transmitted. “Scaring people was deliberate,” its creator, Malcolm Gaskin, told The Guardian in 2017. The price, as we now know, for invoking such terror in the general public was paid by the people left to die alone in hospital, with no loved one to hold their hand. Forty years on, we have a much better understanding of the lives ravaged first by diagnosis and illness, and then again by stigma and shame. If such a campaign was needed now, the messaging would likely be very different. But at the time, the priority was the rapid dissemination of information about a poorly understood and terrifying new disease for which there was no effective treatment. Measured only against that goal, it was a success. When young people are dying preventable deaths and your job is to help them stay alive, avoiding giving offence can’t be your priority.[ Road deaths are not inevitable. Stop referring to them as ‘accidents’Opens in new window ]Australia, famous for its blunt road safety messaging, gets this. Over the years, slogans have included the phrases “if you drink then drive, you’re a bloody idiot” and “speeding - no one thinks big of you”. And then there was VicRoads’ campaign about the risks of using a mobile phone while driving which went, simply, “don’t be a d***head”.Meanwhile, Ireland - where an average of three or four funerals due to road deaths are now happening every single week - leans towards the other extreme. The television campaigns by the Road Safety Authority (RSA) are visually powerful, but its language sometimes seems to frame speeding as an unfortunate but likely irreversible phenomenon on a par with, say, the melting of the polar ice caps. If current trends continue, three or four more people will leave their homes next week and never returnIt talks about “unintentional speeding, where drivers can exceed limits simply because they are on ‘autopilot’” and the “small increases in speed, often unnoticed by drivers familiar with a route”. Even its 2024 “say no to speeding” radio ads “specifically designed around younger men” presented speeding as an amorphous, unidentifiable “killer in our midst, stalking us on rainy nights”.Contributory factors are only published every few years and in aggregate form, such as in the RSA’s Fatal Collisions 2008–2012 report, which found that excessive speed was a factor in one in three crashes analysed, while alcohol contributed to 38 per cent. But by the time those figures are made available, much of the impact has been lost. [ Road death statistics are incomplete unless they include all who diedOpens in new window ]Ireland is cautious about pointing to causal factors, unlike France, which releases figures about the “presumed responsible authors” of fatal crashes (83 per cent are men) or the UK, which collects and publishes presumed contributory-factor data annually, or Australia, where coroners’ reports point out, for example, that none of the occupants of a vehicle was wearing a seatbelt. The RSA assiduously avoids anything that might be perceived “as insensitive or prematurely apportioning blame”, as chairperson Anne Graham put it in a letter to Minister of State Sean Canney in the aftermath of two fatal crashes last year, released this week under freedom of information to The Irish Times. But tact isn’t a good basis for effective public health messaging. As of Friday, Garda figures provisionally recorded 94 road deaths for the year so far – nine more than for the same period in 2025, which was the deadliest on Irish roads in more than a decade. The 2026 death toll includes 38 drivers, 13 passengers, 21 pedestrians, 13 motorcyclists, seven pedal cyclists, and two e-scooter/e-bike users. Of course, it does not take in the 600 people left with devastating injuries in the first six months of the year. If current trends continue, three or four more people will leave their homes next week and never return. They will have died either because of our poor road network, as a result of the choices they or someone else made behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, or some combination of both. But we do have one thing on our side. We can, at least, predict with high confidence who they will be: three-quarters will be men, and nearly one-third will be under the age of 25. An RSA review for 2025 points out that the age group most at risk was 16- to 25-year-olds, accounting for more than one in five road deaths. [ When will we declare Ireland’s road-death toll the public health crisis it is?Opens in new window ]We don’t need to address the crisis on our roads with a campaign like the Aids advertisements in the 1980s - in any case, TV campaigns have lost their power to shock. We do need blunter messaging, better and more contemporaneous data, and a strategy to identify and redesign high-risk stretches of road. We need far more extensive road policing and more fixed speed cameras. We need to give the RSA more authority and fewer responsibilities. The thing we can do first, however, is be far more direct in our communications about who is actually dying on our roads, and where and why. There are many factors involved in Ireland’s rising road death toll. We can’t let our squeamishness be one of them.