Mr. Brendan Walsh:

I will take that. We carry out a couple of different inspections. First, we have our own enforcement officers, who are on the road day and night, and in the first quarter of this year, they have carried out more than 4,000 inspections of commercial vehicles in conjunction with An Garda Síochána. They will carry out in the region of 18,000 inspections over the full year and these are inspections where the driver is pulled over to the roadside. Complementing that, we have our CVRT network, which is the network of old DOE test centres, as they were. So far, they have conducted 148,000 tests this year and are on track to top close to 600,000 inspections, which will cover the entire national fleet operating.

The one I am probably most interested in at the moment relates to the NCT. Last year, in the region of 1.6 million vehicles were inspected within the NCT service. Approximately 44,000 of those vehicles were found to have serious or dangerous defects, and of those 44,000, 3,200 were ultimately scrapped by their owner. In regard to inspections of the national fleet, therefore, and maintaining it to an adequate standard, we have the NCT, the CVRT and our roadside enforcement team, so I think we are well covered in that area, but it is an area we are looking to further increase in respect of roadside inspection with the support of An Garda Síochána.