Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am. I am asking that this be on the syllabus of the young people in transition year and maybe even before that, in third year. The Minister should sit down with the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Bruton, and in the way special needs assistants are taken on special assistants should be taken on to encourage these young people to read and study the rules of the road and to understand the dangers of a mechanically propelled vehicle.

People from the Road Safety Authority was in Clonmel recently to give an emergency services seminar. It had a fine big road show and that was good. There was a simulator car to show everyone, including young girls and boys, the impact of an accident and of a car overturning. The Minister needs to get them trained to drive. Rural drivers have some advantage over city drivers because many of them live on farms or have access to land where they can drive off road. In cities they cannot. Those people should be allowed to learn. They want to learn. There are no more imaginative young people than in our country. Let them learn in school. That might make school more interesting for some people, especially those doing the applied leaving certificate. That is not too academic. The Minister should get them tested and give them a prescriptive education not in a tutorial but where they could be brought along by the excellent teachers in our schools delivering those transition year programmes and have the simulators and the programme to understand the vehicle and its dangers, and to understand to respect the vehicle, the road users and themselves, when they get on the road. That would be another imaginative way, and a compassionate way, of looking at the issue and it would make the transition year programmes much more interesting. Some of them are very good, some not as good. We have groups coming in here every day of the week from different counties. They should be allowed to be enthused about this and to understand driving, whether it be a motorbike, a tractor or a gluaistáin - if the Minister does not know what a gluaistáin is, it is a car - and other vehicles as well. That would be meaningful, productive and enlightening to all of us and would prove that the RSA and the Department and the two or three other quangos attached to it were interested, imaginative and were not a closed book or a closed shop that did not want to listen to, or engage with, the ordinary people, the 1,700 in Tipperary waiting for a date, multiplied by those in all the other counties. It would show that they are interested in the real issues of road safety, not television promotions and advertisements. They might get around to answering parliamentary questions we have put down, like those Deputy Kevin O'Keeffe has put down and many others who cannot get answers. That would be one way to do it, a carrot and stick, mol an óige agus tiocfaidh siad. Train them when they are young. That is necessary because the roads now are much more dangerous and faster.

I heard the Nissan Leaf, an electric car, advertised as going from 0 to 60 km or 70 km in ten seconds. The silence of that car is such that we will not even hear it coming. That is technology and I welcome it but I got a spin in one and I know what it is like, I was a passenger. We have to look at all the new technology. Deputy O'Keeffe was in Germany looking at a driverless car. He spoke about it and asked a few questions about it as well. Maybe we are going to go that road.

We need to keep pace and not have the old system of waiting to do the test, failing it and not being able to apply again for a month, and waiting again. The Taoiseach, when he was Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, could have given the whole national driver licence service, NDLS, to the post offices. They are all over the place. They are closing down and being bought out and forced out. Where stands the Minister in that area? He needs to be a bit imaginative. He should use the staff. I want to thank the local authority staff who dealt with the licences for young and old for decades in each county and did a good job. It was unceremoniously taken away from them. It was going to be better, faster, smarter and more efficient. Tens of millions of euro later we end up with three companies trying to issue the licence now. It is bedding in a bit now but we had disorganised and unprecedented chaos in the meantime.

Then there was the issue of the Government wanting to attach the personal public service number, PPSN, and national identity card to the driving licence. It spent €180 million on that before pulling the plug on it. Fair dues to the Minister. I salute him for doing that. The plug had to be pulled after spending €180 million. One would think we were talking about confetti or chaff.

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