Today marks the final National Slow Down day of the year as thousands of people take to Irish roads this weekend to make the journey home for Christmas.

On Newstalk Breakfast, Garda National Roads Policing Bureau Chief Superintendent Jane Humphries warned drivers not to rush home for the holidays.

“Our main aim is to keep everybody safe on our roads and to get us all to our destination so that we can spend time with friends and family over this Christmas period,” she said.

“It is a stressful time of the year, and it can be very busy with last minute shopping – and it’s very important that we’re all mindful about our speed.

“If you think back to when you were learning to drive, it took a lot of effort and concentration to do simple things like put on the indicator and change the gears. But as we’ve got used to driving, we’re almost on automatic pilot.”

Garda checkpoint. Photo: Colin Keegan.

Ms Humphries said Gardaí would be monitoring roads governed by 80-100 kilometre speed limits especially closely.

“It’s good to be reminded of the importance of speed, because we do know that 15% of all collisions and 30% of fatal collisions are as a direct result of speeding or inappropriate speed,” she said.

“So, it’s useful just to remind ourselves that speed plays a huge part in the collisions on our road.

"It's 365 days of the year we should be aware of the speed that we’re travelling, because it does play a huge part on the collisions on our road.”

Ms Humphries warned that all roads will be incredibly busy today, and urged all road users to be aware of themselves and others.