Ireland: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Dublin has one driving restriction on our books: the Dublin City Council HGV Management Strategy — 5+ axle heavy goods… (heavy vehicle ban). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-15, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2027-03-15.
Ireland enters this corpus on a lorry ban that is nineteen years old and has nothing to do with emissions. Dublin City Council's HGV Management Strategy came into operation on 19 February 2007, and since then a heavy goods vehicle with five or more axles may not drive inside two cordon areas of the city unless it holds a valid permit.
The council states the two areas in its own words: "A cordon area of the city (roughly bounded by the canals) from 7AM to 7PM Monday to Sunday", and "The area around Sandymount (including Strand Rd)", which "operates 24 hrs a day". The hedge in the first is the council's, not ours, and it is the reason this record holds no polygon.
The test is the vehicle's axle count and nothing else: the council answers its own question "Are all vehicles affected?" with "No, as restrictions only applies to 5 or more axle vehicles", so a car, a van or a four-axle lorry is never in this scheme at any hour, and no Euro class, fuel or windscreen label appears anywhere in it. There is no charge for driving in, because driving through is not on offer.
The permit is not sold to whoever wants to pass: a Load/Unload permit costs 10 euros a day, allows a maximum of five stops, and is issued only against a premises inside the cordon that has registered with the council and filed a mitigation plan showing how its deliveries will fall.
The only other permit is free and narrower still — a Restricted Goods or Transit permit for vehicles barred from the Dublin Tunnel because they are over 2.6 metres wide or carrying dangerous goods, and it confines them to the East Wall Road and the Alfie Byrne Road and no other route. Everyone else takes the Dublin Tunnel, uses a smaller truck, or delivers between 19:00 and 07:00.
Enforcement is An Garda Síochána, with direct access to the permit database rather than to a camera: there is no paper permit to show, and a vehicle found somewhere inconsistent with the destination on its permit is treated as having no permit at all. Breaching the scheme is a fixed charge notice of 200 euros. Two dates matter besides 2007.
From 1 March 2022 the Sandymount cordon went from 07:00–19:00 to round the clock, which is when Strand Road stopped being a way into Dublin Port for a five-axle lorry. And the cordon is liftable: for a short Dublin Tunnel closure it stays, but the council states that in a lengthy closure the Gardaí may lift it, announced on the M50 variable message signs and on local radio.
That is an event rather than a timetable, and it is the one thing in this record a driver cannot plan around.