More than 400,000 people are driving without a full licence here, a challenge that demands to be addressed. David Labanyi reports
Gay Byrne, the new chairman of the Road Safety Authority has described as "a scandal" the fact that more than 400,000 people are driving on a provisional licence.
Speaking on Monday at a press conference in Dublin Mr Byrne said, "It is an outrage at the moment that there are upwards of 450,000 people driving on the roads of Ireland who are not entitled to do so. That testers' mess has to be cleared up," he said.
Efforts to reduce the waiting list of almost a year for a driving test were seriously hampered when an attempt by the Department of Transport to outsource 40,000 driving tests was found to be contrary to the terms of the national pay agreement.
This came as a serious blow to Minister for Transport Martin Cullen who had identified outsourcing as the key component in a series of measures announced last year to reduce the waiting list.
Mr Cullen wanted to cut the waiting list to around six weeks by the end of this year before moving ahead with major changes to the driving licence.
However, the Department of Transport now has to find another way of procuring an extra 40,000 driving tests and provisional licence holders are unlikely to see a dramatic fall in waiting times by the end of this year.
The problem for the Department is it does not appear to have a Plan B to outsourcing.
According to unions representing driver testers the answer to the waiting list problem is the same as when Mr Cullen first suggested outsourcing last year - hire more driver testers on short-term contracts and implement an overtime scheme to provide additional tests in the evenings and at weekends. Louise O'Donnell was the IMPACT negotiator when outsourcing was first proposed. "We didn't see then why they needed to outsource in the first place. All they needed to do was bring in 15 extra contract staff. They advertised for 10 additional staff, they have an interview list of 80. Instead of hiring 10 they should have gone for 25," she said.
One reason this option was not used, according to the Department of Transport, was due to the Department of Finance ceiling on the hiring of civil servants. The poor condition of the test centres was another factor, according to the Department, which has doubts about the ability of additional temporary testers to have access to the necessary booking and IT infrastructure to make a significant impact.
What is not in doubt is that it has taken nearly a year to reach a point where outsourcing appears to be off the table and that during that time the waiting list has lengthened.
IMPACT believes that a recently started overtime package can deliver an extra 50,000 tests a year. It says the Government delayed this overtime scheme for a year because it insisted it be linked to an agreement on outsourcing.
"The reality is that this could have been addressed last May and we'd be half way to clearing the backlog by now. If this was about road safety they'd put their obsession with outsourcing behind them," said Ms O'Donnell. The unions met with the Department of Transport last week and proposed a number of initiatives to try and increase the number of tests. Further meetings to discuss the issue are planned for the near future.
Mr Cullen has received support for his outsourcing plan from an unlikely figure in Fine Gael's transport spokeswoman Olivia Mitchell. She has called for any new partnership deal to allow outsourcing to clear driving test backlog. She was also critical of the ability of the existing driver testers to significantly reduce the waiting list.
She said that between "2000 and 2005, the Government recruited an extra ten driving testers, yet the annual number of tests fell by 34,876 over the same period."
The average wait is now over ten months and with insurance premiums on average 30 per cent higher for provisional drivers the cost of having 404,000 provisional drivers on the waiting list adds €23 million to the motor insurance bill, according to figures from Macra na Feirme.
Ciara Williams (22) had to wait for over a year for her test which she is due to sit at the Finglas test centre next week. The science student at Dublin City University relies on her car to get to college from her Clondalkin home. Her insurance is €1,400 per year.
"I am pretty frustrated now. When I applied they said it would be a couple of months but it has just gone on and on. Because it will take another year to resit the test if you fail, there is extra pressure to pass first-time around.
Julette Kearney (23) waited for over a year for her test, which she successfully completed last week. She says she lost out on a job which required her to have a full licence while waiting for the test. "I had a job with a company in Connemara but it was dependent on me getting the licence so I sent the letter. But it took two months and by then they had found someone."
She recently transferred to Dublin from Galway but experienced problems in getting her name put onto one of the waiting lists for a Dublin test centre. "It took a couple of months. I work with adults with learning disabilities and I was coming under pressure to get the licence. You need the full licence if you have clients in the car."
John Walsh, managing director at the Irish School of Motoring says the driving test fiasco highlights many problems in the sector, principally training. "People are going forward who are nowhere near ready to take the test. That's why 46 per cent fail." This high failure rate, coupled with the fact that there are about 19,000 cancellations or no-shows each year compounds the difficulties with reducing the waiting list.
"The system is totally inadequate. A high percentage of people take no lessons and only come to us a day or so before their test, usually for a pre-test. You can't get rid of all those bad habits in three hours.
There is no penalty if you fail the test in this country. You do your test. If you fail you drive home. Usually unaccompanied.
"Overall, the standard of driving by candidates is appallingly low. And it is getting worse." said Mr Walsh. "The current driving test is unchanged since 1964 and bears no relation to modern networks or vehicles," he said.
Perhaps the most sobering aspect of the waiting list is that less than a third of provisional drivers, about 137,000, have actually signed up to do a test. The remaining 270,000 are content to drive on a provisional licence safe in the knowledge they are unlikely to be penalised for driving unaccompanied.