Donna McGettigan (Clare, Sinn Fein)
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442. To ask the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the number of driving testers moved from testing drivers of articulated lorries, buses and trucks to drivers of cars, each month, in 2025, for each county, in tabular form; the number transferred in the other direction; the number of drivers on the driving test waiting lists for cars and for articulated lorries, buses and trucks, for each month in 2025, for each county, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [41959/25]

Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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Under the Road Safety Authority Act 2006, the Road Safety Authority (RSA) has statutory responsibility for the National Driver Testing Service. Neither I nor my officials are involved in the service at an operational level. Given the RSA's responsibility in this matter, I have referred the Deputy's question to the RSA for direct response. Please contact my office if a reply is not received within ten days.

Pending this response, the Deputy will be aware that I have made resolving the longstanding issue of Category B driving test wait times a priority since taking office. However, I am also concerned that measures to improve Category B wait times do not come at the cost of increasing wait times in other categories. With this in mind, when preparing their service recovery plan published in May, I directed the RSA to not pursue any measures that reassigned testing capacity to Category B testing.

However, due to the more advanced nature of the work, there is a high level of overlap between experienced testers who are able to deliver tests outside of Category B and testers who are able to train new recruits. As the RSA has accelerated its recruitment and deployment of driver testers in recent months, this has led to a temporary reduction of testing capacity within other testing categories but is not the result of reassignment of testers to Category B testing at the cost of other learners.

In anticipation of this temporary loss in capacity to deliver non-Category B tests, the RSA assigned additional capacity to such tests during the month of May before commencing its accelerated training and deployment programme. In that month, just over 1,100 Category C and D tests were delivered nationwide. This was the largest number of such tests conducted in a month this year and 24 per cent above the monthly average for the first four months of the year. I do acknowledge, however, that the combined number of such tests conducted in June fell to 534 for the reasons I have outlined, and am aware of the difficulties this is causing for industry.

With the RSA expecting to have fully employed its sanction of 200 permanent driver testers by the end of August, and all testers conducting tests rather than temporarily reassigned to deliver necessary training, rapid progress can be expected across all testing categories towards the service level agreement target.