Mr. John Hogan:

If I may take the Deputy through our thinking on this, that might help with his question. I am conscious that several people who applied for primary medical certificates but were not successful in that application have sought a mechanism of appeal. The board of appeal resigned. That is a statement of fact. We need to find a mechanism through which those appeals can be dealt with and that is the process that we have under way in the first instance.

The second item is the future of the scheme and how it is structured. I mentioned earlier that the scheme has probably been in existence since the 1960s. The definition of "disability" is very much framed in that era, if I may describe it in that way. It is framed against a definition of "disability" that is very much in the physical area. Some of the areas that were raised in the Supreme Court decision bring the wider aspects of disability into play. As part of the issue and how we bring this forward, there is an ongoing engagement with our colleagues in the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, where the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, is chairing a review group into transport mobility schemes. The progress from that in respect of policy outcomes should be very much framed in how we look at where the disabled drivers scheme should and could go in future. That stream of work is very much under way. We have been feeding into that but also looking at an information-gathering exercise which included the outgoing members of the disabled drivers board of appeal to see what best practice is internationally, how these issues are dealt with in other jurisdictions and whether tax is the appropriate mechanism for dealing with them. That work has progressed to a significant extent and we are now feeding it into the mechanism that is chaired by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

There is a two-pronged approach to what we are trying to do here. One aspect is to recognise that there may be legitimate reasons individuals believed they were unsuccessful in their application for a primary medical certificate and we need to find a mechanism for dealing with that in the short term, but in the longer term it is to look at the wider issue in respect of the whole scheme and how it fits into the best mechanism for supporting transport mobility for disabled people.