Mr. Ruair? Creaney:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for taking the time to listen to the views of Fórsa today. In particular I thank Deputy Duncan Smith for arranging for me to be here today.

I want to speak about the experience of our members in precarious insecure temporary contracts working in the Road Safety Authority, which is a vital public agency. As we have seen in recent weeks, its work is more important now than ever. Fórsa believes there should be an additional 40 permanent driver testers employed in the Road Safety Authority. We want the RSA to seek sanction for that and for the Department of Transport to sanction the request as a matter of urgency.

A significant number of the RSA’s driver testers are employed on temporary contracts lasting from 18 months to two years. Temporary contracts were initially introduced as a temporary interim measure to tackle a large backlog in driver tests, mostly as a result of the pandemic. However, we are now several years into that supposedly interim temporary measure and there is still no indication of all our members enjoying the benefits of secure and permanent contracts of employment.

There are currently about 125 permanent driver testers and about 45 temporary testers. The waiting time for a driving test sits at around 24 weeks. Those are the last figures the union saw. That is significantly above-----