Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

I am pleased the Department of Finance has supported the measures I proposed and I thank the Minister for Finance for that. The number of testers employed is substantially larger than it was. I do not know why the Deputy says there are fewer now. I can give her the figures if she wishes. There are 129 testers and several vacancies, which I intend to fill immediately.

We have appointed a new chief executive officer to lead the driving standards authority. Under his aegis the authority will put a block of tests out to tender in the market. He has assured me this is possible. We will incentivise our own driver testers on the number of tests carried out over a base figure of so many tests per day. Approximately 40,000 of the backlog of 80,000 tests will be carried out by our testers and the balance by outside testers. My wish is that the backlog will be cleared by the end of next year when the waiting time will be a matter of weeks.

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