Mr. Tom O'Mahony:

The issue here is where a car is picked up by the speed cameras and is found to be registered to a company rather to an individual. The question then relates to who is driving. A provision was put into the Road Traffic Act 2004 so that if the registered owner of the car did not give information as to who was actually driving it, the registered owner was responsible for the offence. If the registered owner was a company, it would mean that the company would have to pay the fixed charge penalty but, of course, that would mean that no penalty points would be assigned anywhere, so from a company's point of view, the penalty is probably a fairly minor deterrent. In order to strengthen that, the 2010 Act included a new provision that gave the Garda the power to seek information from a company regarding the driver details - in other words, the member of staff who had this car registration out at a particular time on a particular day. Non-compliance was made an offence with a maximum penalty of €5,000.

That part of the Road Traffic Act 2010 is not yet commenced because, unfortunately, it is in the same part of the Act as a provision dealing with what we refer to as the third payment. I will explain what the third payment is and the difficulties in this area. The problem is that the Act is drafted in such a way that these two provisions are entirely intertwined so it is not possible to commence the company car provision until we can commence the provision about the third payment. I am assuming the Deputy has never been unfortunate enough to get penalty points, but if he had been-----