Ms Paula Hilman:

We never stopped enforcement in respect of the NCT. A question was raised when the Leas-Chathaoirleach was out of the room about discretion. Certainly, at the time of the backlogs, that was left very much to the discretion of gardaí. Again, because we cannot be that prescriptive, they could use their discretion when someone produced an appointment for an NCT. That was the very pragmatic and practical approach we took. To give an example, over the last five years, we have detected over 30,000 people driving without an NCT. Even during the period of the backlog, we still would have seized vehicles and issued fixed charge notices, FCNs, for having no NCT.