I’ve been following Ireland’s e-scooter law saga on Goosed for some time now with plenty of opinions on the age limit, the helmet debate, the endless back and forth on registration, and honestly none of it has surprised me as much as what came out of Morning Ireland this week.
From Friday, September 4th, e-scooter riders in Ireland are legally required to wear a helmet and high-visibility clothing. Anyone stopped without either faces a €100 fine, with An Garda Síochána responsible for enforcing it.
Here’s the bit that should worry anyone hoping this changes anything on Irish footpaths and cycle lanes. Today, just days before the law even took effect, GRA president Niall Hodgins went on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland and said “enforcement in respect of these new regulations is likely to be weak”. That’s not me being cynical about it, that’s the union representing rank and file Gardaí saying it publicly, on air, before the ink is even dry.
And nobody should be overly surprised by it either.
Two bones I have to pick with this admission
The core issue, as Hodgins laid it out, comes down to two things. First, gardaí have no real way of pursuing anyone who doesn’t stop. Beat Gardaí aren’t trained for it (see also motorway pursuits where drivers go the wrong way), and the force still doesn’t have the legal protections in place to give chase safely, the same gap that’s already been flagged around pursuing wrong-way drivers and scramblers.
Second, there’s still no registration system for e-scooters, so once a rider speeds off, mounts a footpath, or does a runner after a collision, there’s no paper trail leading back to them. Hodgins pointed out there was a clear intention in government to police e-scooters the way cars are policed, but without registration that intention doesn’t have anywhere to land.
Who ends up paying for this?
The people who’ll feel this law hardest are the ones who were never the problem in the first place. Picture the average commuter on an e-scooter heading into work, helmet forgotten on the hall table or hi-vis left in the other bag. This could so easily be me and that’s before we get into what grey areas these bring. What is a helmet? Bicycle helmet or moped helmet? What’s hi-viz? Would my backpack cover count?
Anyway, these honest commuters get flagged down, they stop straight away because that’s what you do when a guard puts a hand up, and they’re the one left explaining themselves and paying €100 for it. Meanwhile the crowd doing wheelies past that same Garda, the ones the whole law was supposedly aimed at, keep going. Hodgins has already told the nation there’s no capability to chase them. The honest, hard-working commuter gets punished for stopping. Everyone else gets away with it for the exact same reason.
Would registration alone have fixed this?
I’m not fully convinced it would, if I’m honest. Registering every e-scooter in the country wouldn’t stop someone from speeding off or ignoring a direction to pull in, that’s a training and legal protection problem more than a paperwork one. But I can see why it would help. A registration plate gives Gardaí somewhere to go after the fact, a name and address tied to the machine, the same way it works for a car or a motorbike involved in a hit and run. It wouldn’t catch anyone in the moment, but it would mean the rider who leaves the scene isn’t simply untraceable, which right now they are.
None of this means the new rules are pointless. Helmets and hi-vis genuinely make a difference if a scooter goes over at speed, and I’d rather see people wearing both than not. My issue is with pretending this fixes the actual problem, which is scooters being ridden dangerously by people who have no intention of stopping for anyone. Until gardaí have the training, the legal cover, and some way of identifying a rider after the fact, this law is mostly going to catch the people who were doing their best to follow it anyway.
Let’s not forget that it was children in ICU that started the furore around electric scooters. So a box tick exercise that doesn’t target the problem is a slap in the face.
Was this something that had to be said? Yes. But it’s also a message to those who the laws were aimed at. “As you were”.
