Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will ask the Minister of State a number of very serious questions. He is the Minister of State at the Department of Transport and there is a new regulation after being sent out whereby young drivers driving most vehicles will have to have an artic licence to cover them while driving. Does he realise the implications of this for young people who are trying to get going? What he is saying is that they can drive when they are transporting farm produce but they cannot operate without having an artic licence if they are working on a building site or do some other kind of work for a public body in another type of public scenario. Does he really understand what he is doing? Who dictated this law? Who made the change to the category W licence to require such drivers to have an artic licence? Does the Minister of State know that people cannot access this licence until they are 21 years of age, whereas they are normally able to drive a tractor when they are 16? Where is the data supporting the view that anything untoward was going on with these vehicles. Most of them can do a maximum speed of 40 km/h, which is not even 30 miles per hour. What is going on? Who is dictating these laws or where are they coming from? Was it the Irish Government? It does not seem to be an EU-wide requirement. We need to know first of all where this regulation came from.

I will ask a very important question. To have an artic licence, you had to be driving a vehicle with a fifth wheel and that type of a scenario was only to be found in an articulated truck. Then you could have a rigid lorry with a trailer behind it. You could have a load on the lorry and a load on the trailer pulled behind it but when it was not connected to the part of the towing vehicle by a fifth wheel, you could drive it with an ordinary rigid licence. Who is advising the Department? This is not thought-out properly at all. To be fair to the farmers, the one thing that helped to keep a young fella at home with them was if he could get a bit of work with a tractor and trailer locally with a builder or someone else for a few hours or a few days. This helped to sustain the young fella at home. They were also able to stay with the farmer in the first instance but now they will not be able to stay at home. This is going to affect local contractors on the other side who were maybe building a few houses, or maybe one house, and the young fella was able to go down the road and draw away the few loads of stuff-----

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