Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 30 June 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

General Scheme of the Road Traffic (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2019: Minister for Transport

Photo of Eamon RyanEamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is full of examples, which I did not mention in my opening statement, of many legislative changes that are important in the sector. One example is driving instruction. We will legislate for people who test members of the Garda, fire brigades and the National Ambulance Service. As you can imagine, those drivers have specific powers and responsibilities in being able to drive in certain ways on the roads. The testers for those require regulatory powers and they are given in the Bill.

There is a very clear political imperative to scale up our abilities so that we can clear the backlogs in both the theory and driving tests. Any cases where, for example, a theory test centre is not open when someone was informed it would be is obviously of real concern. I do not have details on that. I have some statistics for the three weeks to 21 June. Some 21,176 tests were scheduled and 16,493 were undertaken, for which there was a pass rate of 12,871 and a failure rate of 3,622. There were also no-shows, for a variety of reasons, numbering 3,061, which has been an issue, possibly because we are dealing with a backlog legacy. We are very keen to clear that backlog. There is no shortage of resources, going online in the case of the theory test and hiring additional theory test staff and driving instructors, so I am confident we will be able to clear the backlog.

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