Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

There were 18,000 people on the lists at the Tallaght driving test centre at the start of this year. This was the highest figure in the State. The Minister of State and I had one or two conversations about it. It was taking seven months on average to get a test. It was reported at the start of April that the Road Safety Authority was planning on opening an additional driving test centre in south Dublin. This is something I have been advocating for in the House for several years and while I am glad that there has finally been an acknowledgement of the problem, it should never have taken this long. There has been a refusal by successive Governments to accept that no test centre is meeting the statutory maximum of ten weeks under the service-level agreement. Ten weeks is all it should take, but one could be waiting up to ten months at some testing centres.

More and more learner drivers are being stopped on the roads driving unaccompanied. I am not condoning it but what can we expect to happen when people have done their lessons and we then force them to wait for six, eight or ten months for a test?

What the people of south Dublin want to know is whether a location has been identified for the new testing centre. Has a recruitment campaign for staff begun and when can we expect the first test to be held? These are reasonable questions. None of this should take more than a few weeks. The demand is clearly there. There are only two other centres in south Dublin, namely, in Tallaght and Deansgrange. That presents a huge choice of areas to place a new centre. I raised this matter when Tallaght and Deansgrange had the highest numbers in the State. There should be no obstacles to the centre's opening soon unless there is a lack of political will to do so. If the Government and the RSA are serious about their obligations to learner drivers, it will be up and running before the end of the summer because the level of service currently being provided simply is not good enough. We are denying people access to employment, education and childcare and it cannot continue.

I am probably in one of the lucky areas because it is an urban area and there is alternative transport but one hears of students who cannot get to the likes of UCD because of really poor service. While we should be improving public transport and encouraging its use, we cannot deny that, for many, learning to drive is an important life skill in itself and a driver licence is one of the most popular forms of identification for use in everyday life. My focus is on Tallaght because I am its local representative, but this cannot stop with Tallaght. We need to identify where population demands necessitate additional centres and we need to ramp up the number of permanent testers. Every week and month we delay is only adding thousands of learner drivers to a chronically overloaded system. The Minister of State should do whatever he can. It needs to be fixed and the sooner, the better.

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