Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for their contributions and opening statements. Car testing is an issue across the country. Averages are a tyranny in these situations. Someone said one time that if a billionaire moved into your parish, the average income of everyone would go up by an awful lot but it would not do a lot for everybody else. It is a similar scenario here. We find that in certain areas, people are waiting very long periods for a car test. I booked one today in Carrick-on-Shannon for 13 October. That, in fairness, is pretty good. I have talked to people in other places who have been waiting for four or five months. That is the difficulty.

I appreciate that a lot of work has been done on recruitment to try to resolve these issues. The last time the witnesses were before the committee, there was a backlog and it has, in many cases, grown. Those comments apply not to the NCT but to the driving test. The issue is going to continue to be a problem unless something radical is done to resolve it. There is one thing that annoys people and I wonder if there is a temporary or partial solution to it. Consider a person who books a test on 1 January. That person will have to wait three or four months before the test. When he or she does the test, the next test is due again on 1 January. One would expect that the next test date would be scheduled for a year from the date the car was tested because on that date, the vehicle was deemed roadworthy and the test is sufficient, rather than the next test being scheduled for six or seven months later. That would also have an impact on the waiting lists because it would push those dates out a little further. I would like to hear the response of our witnesses to that point.

I have another suggestion that could resolve these issues in a temporary way. I do not mean to suggest that we should in any way take our eyes off the ball in ensuring that vehicles on the road are roadworthy. However, beyond a certain age, a car falls into a category that requires it to be tested every two years or every year. Could those requirements be pushed out by a year under the circumstances we are facing until we catch up with the backlog? We could then try to take it back to the standard we have at the moment. Those are two suggestions and I wonder why they have not been considered in the context of the difficulties in recruitment and spending €1 million to try to bring people in from abroad to try to solve those difficulties. I understand that must be done but we should be looking at other ways of trying to resolve this problem.