Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There is a serious problem with driver licences. The Minister of State needs to go back to the RSA and find out what it is doing with the number of driver testers. This is a numbers game. The RSA does not have enough driver testers. It makes no sense. A derogation should have been given for the 30 staff who were there. In the current climate, a way should have been found to give a derogation to retain those staff for whatever period of time was necessary to deal with the backlog. They are hugely experienced and could have been recruited in the normal way over time on permanent contracts but they needed to be held. Could the Minister of State tell me about the €3.6 million allocated to the Coast Guard? How did that come about?