Dublin District Court is setting aside a full day of special sittings in two weeks to deal with some 200 Dublin drivers who have failed to pay their speeding fines since penalty points were introduced. Olivia Kelly reports.
This special date has been scheduled following last month's leaked Garda report which suggested that up to 2,000 speeding offenders could escape prosecution due to delays in the penalty points system.
The extra burden caused by the introduction of the points system, which will have to be operated manually for at least another year, has meant that the penalty points office has not had adequate resources to process offenders' summonses. Speeding motorists who have not paid their fines must receive a summons within six months of the offence. If the summons does not arrive on time the offence becomes statute-barred, and the motorist is no longer liable for prosecution.
The internal Garda audit of the system found that up to the end of January no summonses had been applied for for speeding motorists who had refused to pay their fines since the system went live on October 31st, 2002.
Since then some 200 summons have been sent out to residents in the Dublin area, the worst region for recorded speeding offences. To date 13,394 motorists have been notified that points are going on their licences. However, it is not known how many of these have refused to pay and are due summonses.
Last Monday the Deputy Garda Commissioner, Mr Noel Conroy, and the Assistant Garda Commissioner, Mr Tony Hickey, met the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan.
The gardaí assured him that a court date would be set aside to deal with the speeding offenders. The original date given to the Minister was April 17th; however, The Irish Times learned last night that this date is no longer available, and the 23rd or 24th have now been proposed.
If a court date fails to be set before the end of the month the earlier offenders are likely to go over the six-month deadline and escape prosecution.
It is not known how many offenders it will be possible to process on the day. Meanwhile it has emerged that, despite commitments from Mr Brennan last January to reduce the backlog of provisional drivers requiring tests, waiting times have again increased. Six testing centres have now topped the seven-month mark in delays. Naas has the longest waiting time at 31 weeks.
The wait in Churchtown and Tallaght has increased from 26 weeks at the start of January to 30.
Longford residents are also waiting 30 weeks for a test. In Ballina and Waterford the delays are 29 and 28 weeks respectively. The average is now more than 22 weeks.
More than 130,000 provisional licence-holders are now on the waiting list for tests.
A spokesman for Mr Brennan said yesterday that the Department of Transport had managed to negotiate an extra 40,000 tests over the coming year, through offering a bonus scheme to existing testers and allowing retired testers to return to work on a contract basis.