John Kelly (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I again welcome the Minister to the House. As he said, this is a technical bill, and both of my colleagues here have raised the areas of contention, which I will not go back over. I wish to mention a related matter, and it is not my provisional licence issue, which I have raised on numerous occasions with the Minister. I happened to be in the home of a hackney driver last week. I noticed that on his mantelpiece he had a large amount of envelopes and he told me what they were. He works with a hackney company and every time he goes on a shift he gets a letter from the National Transport Authority, NTA, to say that he is on duty, and when he clocks off he gets another letter from them to say that he clocked off. Therefore, if he has four shifts of hackney driving for the week, he gets eight letters, and if he has five shifts, he gets ten it acknowledged that he was going on duty, and likewise, when he was finished, he sent a text message and it again acknowledged it. It seems, considering the amount of hackney drivers there are, that thousands of these letters are going out every week, and I wonder about the cost factor, and why it is necessary.