Noel Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)

When problems arose with the operation of the system and when some of the difficulties were highlighted here and in other places, I took the matter up, through the officials in the Department, with the NRA. The NRA admitted there were difficulties but to be fair to the authority, it had made it clear initially that there would be teething problems with the system, and that was the case. There was a particular difficulty with the service call centre due to the volume of calls and, frankly, the many abusive calls in the earlier stage. However, that has been resolved.

There is no place in the world that a system such as this has been rolled out without difficulties. There will be ongoing misidentifications. One will not get 100% accuracy but an inaccuracy rate of 0.2% is quite a good record. According to the information on Toronto's Highway 407, Dubai and the systems in Sydney and Melbourne in Australia there were huge problems at the initiation of the systems but they have been ironed out. I agree with the Deputy that the NRA should continue to give the high level of service and follow-up that is necessary. I will try to ensure it does.

It should be noted that the system has been hugely successful in terms of take-up. In the initial stages it was anticipated that between 40,000 and 60,000 vehicles would be registered. That has been hugely exceeded with approximately 400,000 vehicles registered in advance. That has eased problems.

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