Terms of use

These terms apply to everyone who uses RoadSafe Ireland, with or without an account. The community guidelines form part of them, and the privacy notice explains separately what is done with information about you.

Last updated 16 August 2026

1. What this service is

A platform for recording and publishing community observations about road safety in Ireland: problems with roads, and driving that people witnessed. Reports are the accounts of the people who wrote them. They are not verified against any official record, they are not findings of fact, and publication here is not a statement by us that a report is true.

Nothing here is a report to An Garda Síochána, the Road Safety Authority or a local authority, and nothing submitted here is passed to them.

2. Accounts

• You must be at least 16 to hold an account. That is the digital age of consent in Ireland.
• One account per person. Use an email address you can receive mail at — an account cannot submit anything until the address is confirmed, and the decisions on your reports are sent there.
• Keep your password to yourself. Anything submitted from your account is treated as submitted by you.
• You can close your account at any time from your account, and you do not have to ask us.

3. What you may post

The community guidelines set this out in full. In short: describe what you saw, keep everybody’s personal details out of it, do not identify or describe a person, do not post abuse or threats, do not report things you did not witness, and do not use reports to advertise or to continue a private dispute.

You keep the rights in what you write. By submitting a report you give us permission to publish it on this platform, to edit its formatting, and to keep it for as long as these terms and the retention periods in the privacy notice allow. We do not sell it, license it on, or use it to train anything.

4. How moderation works

This is the whole of it, in order.

Before any of it

Submitting any form on this site — a report, a sign-in, a complaint about content, a request about your own information — runs an automatic check that the form is being filled in by a person rather than by a program. It does not read what you wrote and it decides nothing about it. If it does not pass, the form says so and you can reload the page and try again. It needs JavaScript, and there is no way to submit a form here without it.

The automated step

When a report is submitted, its text is checked automatically for patterns that look like personal information — email addresses, phone numbers, Eircodes, PPS numbers, bank details, web links and vehicle registrations — and for abusive language. The check is a set of fixed patterns. It does not use profiling, and it does not consider anything about you or your history.

What it is allowed to do is send a report back to you with an explanation, while the form is still open, so you can fix it. It cannot publish a report and it cannot reject one. There is no automated decision here that produces a legal effect for anybody.

The human step

Every report that gets past the automated step is read by a moderator, who decides whether it is published. Nothing on this platform is published without a person deciding to publish it, and nothing is refused without a person deciding to refuse it.

The decisions available to a moderator are:

• Publish — the report goes live.
• Send back for editing — something specific needs to change, and you are told what.
• Refuse — the report is not published.
• Hold — the report is kept but not shown. On the vehicle side this is usually a report giving only part of a registration, which cannot be published against a vehicle until it is matched to one.

Published content can also be removed later, if a complaint about it is upheld.

Two other things can happen to a report you wrote, and neither is a decision about you. Somebody the report is about may exercise their right to have inaccurate information about them corrected, in which case we change that part of the text, the page states that it was corrected and when, and we email you what it now says. Or they may ask us to stop showing it while a question about it is settled, in which case it comes off the site until that is resolved and goes back afterwards. Both come with a written reason, and both can be challenged the same way any other decision can.

When a decision goes against you

You are sent a statement of reasons: what was decided, why, whether an automated check was involved, and how to challenge it. The same statement appears on your reports. This is what DSA Article 17 requires, and it applies to every decision that goes against a report, including holding one.

5. Challenging a decision

Internal appeal. Any decision that went against one of your reports can be appealed from your reports, free, for at least six months after the decision. A person reviews it — never an automated system — and you are told the outcome and the reasoning. If the appeal succeeds against a removal, the content is restored. If it succeeds against a refusal, the report goes back into the queue to be reviewed again, which is what reversing that decision means; it is not published unread.

Out-of-court dispute settlement. If you are unhappy with the outcome of an appeal, you may bring the dispute to an out-of-court dispute settlement body certified under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act. Those bodies are certified in Ireland by Coimisiún na Meán, the Irish Digital Services Coordinator, and their decisions are not binding on either of us. Going to one of them does not stop you going to court.

The courts. Nothing above affects your right to bring proceedings in the Irish courts.

6. Reporting content to us

Anyone can report content on this platform, with or without an account, at report content. That is the notice route under Article 16 of the Digital Services Act. A notice that gives us enough to act on gets a decision from a person, and you are told what it was.

If a registration has been read wrong and reports have landed on your vehicle, this is not my vehicle is the faster route and asks you for less.

7. Suspension

An account that repeatedly submits content breaking the guidelines, or that repeatedly sends notices or appeals that are obviously unfounded, can be suspended. We give a warning first except where the content is unlawful or someone is being put at risk, and a suspension can be appealed the same way a decision on a report can.

8. What we do not promise

The service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available without interruption, that every report is accurate, or that a report you submit will be published. Reports are other people’s accounts of what they saw, and should be read that way.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Beyond that, our liability to you is limited to what the law requires. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

9. Changes

These terms can change. The date at the top says when they last did, and anything that materially affects existing accounts is notified by email at least fourteen days before it takes effect — long enough to read it and close the account if you would rather not continue. Continuing to use the service after a change means the new terms apply.

10. Law and contact

Irish law governs these terms, and the Irish courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country’s mandatory consumer law.

This deployment has not published a contact address yet. RoadSafe Ireland is not yet operated by a named legal entity, so there is no postal address or contact mailbox to give here. Until there is, the forms on this site are the routes that work: Your rights for anything about information held about you, Report content for anything published here, and This is not my vehicle if a registration is wrong. All three reach a person.