Experienced Irish motorists need to read the new rules of the road as much as beginners or immigrants, according to the Road Safety Authority.
Chief executive Noel Brett said that "all the penalty points that have been issued for people going round a roundabout the wrong way have been to Irish drivers".
Mr Brett said immigrants, who made up one in eight of the workforce and one in 11 of the population, "are not figuring disproportionately in road fatalities" or injuries.
He was speaking at a briefing to mark the distribution of 1.76 million copies of the new rules of the road, one to every household in the State.
Delivery began in August and every household is expected to have a copy by the end of September.
Mr Brett called on the public to "read the rules now. Don't put it off." There were new rules for motorways and roundabouts which were not in the last rules, published 12 years ago.
Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey also pointed to "changes in the road system, with new signage. For example, there are now signs for trams which weren't in existence a few years back."
The rules have a "plain English" seal of approval and will also be available for downloading from the authority's website in Irish, French, Polish, Russian and Mandarin Chinese.
Welcoming the publication and distribution of the new rules of the road, which were funded at a cost of almost €2 million by the Irish Insurance Federation (IIF), the Minister said there was always a job to be done to improve road safety.
He also pointed to the reduction in waiting times for driving tests. They had gone from an average of 33 weeks to 22 weeks, and by next February they would be "virtually on demand".
Mr Dempsey plans to bring the new five-year road safety strategy to Government at the end of the month. He told the Dáil before the recess that implementing the strategy, including legislation, would be his number one priority.
The chairman of the Road Safety Authority, Gay Byrne, called on every road user to read the rules of the road. "A good number of people think that the rules of the road are for people who are taking their driving tests - and they are," he said, "but everyone needs to read them, whether motorist, motorcyclist or pedestrian. We are killing an awful lot of pedestrians."
He said the authority was not asking people to read the rules from beginning to end but the sections that applied to them. "Pedestrians read the pedestrian section, motorcyclists read that section," he said.
The new rules book was relevant for everyone, "even if you have been driving for 40 years without an accident".
The Road Safety Authority is a year old this month and its chairman said they had been dealing with 25 years of neglect in this area. They now had the basic building blocks in place for the implementation of the road safety strategy.
Brendan Murphy, deputy president of the IIF, urged Mr Dempsey and Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan to direct both full-time and reserve Garda resources into road traffic law enforcement.
Asked about further insurance incentives for motorists, Mr Murphy said premiums had gone down 54 per cent in four years.
