Why do people drive unnecessarily large cars (AKA "SUVS")?

In your case, I would have to accept the premise that it should be reasonably expected for children to cycle 3km to school.

no, you wouldn't have to accept that premise. you could have just answered the question about whether you think the roads are safe for children to cycle, which was so clearly the point of the question, without trying to ludicrously pick holes in the theoretical example used.

anyway, this is the question; do you think irish roads are safe for children to cycle on?

cheers, at least you addressed the question directly, while SeanW was dodging it.

but as you might expect, i will disagree with your conclusions; why should roads only be for drivers or adults? why shouldn't society have an expectation that it should be safe for a child to cycle to school?

you say 'no roads are safe for children'; why should suburban ones for example not be safe? why does the netherlands (to take the most obvious example) enjoy a stat that something like 30%+ of primary school kids cycle to school, where in ireland, we've a tenth of that rate of secondary school students cycling to school?

the original point i was addressing was the laughable claim that road safety is a non-issue, which i know you didn't make, so unfortunately i've possibly ended up asking you to address points in an argument you didn't forward.

NL is an interesting case where not understanding or allowing for the obvious differences between us and NL leads you to superficial conclusions that roads here are safer. overall, their death rate per capita is approx 30% higher than here.

but if you take cyclists out of the equation; their death rate drops from 4.1 to 2.4 per 100k people. ours drops from 3.2 to 3 when you take cyclists out.

so for non-cyclists, their per capita fatality rate is 20% lower. but the death rate among cyclists is far higher, despite the safe cycling infrastructure; but we know the dutch cycle at levels completely alien to the irish. 1.1% of irish primary students cycle to school, but in NL it seems to be about 30%. it's something like 60%+ who cycle to secondary school, compared with 3.5% here.

if students here started cycling to school in the same numbers as they do in NL, there would be no debate about how safe our roads are; there'd be carnage.

worth noting that the age of the cycling cohort has a very large influence on fatality levels - older people are far less likely to be able to survive a serious collision. almost three quarters of the cyclist fatalities in NL are people 60 or over; and people are far more likely to keep cycling into old age in NL than here. and they saw a significant upswing in fatalities as e-bikes became popular and older people who had given up cycling, started cycling again.

but overall, the deaths per km travelled by bike in NL is estimated to be between one third and one half what it is in ireland.

so TL;DR - NL is possibly* safer than ireland for non-cyclists, and NL is much safer than ireland for cyclists.

*i've not been able to find stats for non-cyclist deaths per bn km for NL; it's quite possible that they use their cars less because they use their bikes more, which would naturally result in a lower figure.