Motorists accompanying learner drivers cannot be breathalysed

FULLY-LICENSED motorists accompanying a learner permit holder cannot be breathalysed, the Department of Transport said last night.

Since midnight on Monday, all learner permit holders must be accompanied by a driver holding a full licence continuously for the previous two years.

A learner driver accompanied by a person not meeting this criteria will be treated as unaccompanied if stopped by gardaí and faces a €1,000 fine on conviction.

About 92,000 holders of a second learner permit, formerly a provisional licence, were directly affected by this week’s change and there are more than 330,000 drivers on learner permits.

However, as reported by The Irish Times yesterday, there is no alcohol restriction on an accompanying driver. The department spokeswoman confirmed last night that “accompanying drivers cannot be breathalysed” and said “there are no plans currently under active consideration to introduce [such] a provision”.

Fine Gael transport spokesman Fergus O’Dowd said this was at odds with the legislative requirement for an accompanying driver to “supervise” the inexperienced motorist.

“I plan to raise this with the Minister because quite clearly if the accompanying driver is p****d and not fit to drive themselves they cannot be properly supervising the learner driver. It is ridiculous.”

“The Minister needs to clarify this and also how the word ‘supervision’ is defined,” Mr O’Dowd said.

Conor Faughnan, public affairs manager with AA Ireland, said despite the publicity, many learner drivers had been caught by surprise by the changes and were now looking to get a test as quickly as possible.

“While I have no doubt that the average waiting time for a test is eight weeks, from communications we have received it appears to be far longer in some parts of the country and yes there would be some frustration with that.”

The department said there had been little public reaction to the change, unlike the public outcry last October when Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey and the Road Safety Authority (RSA) sought to close the loophole allowing second provisional licence holders drive unaccompanied over the bank holiday weekend.

An RSA spokeswoman said the changes had not prompted a spike in applications for driving tests.

“It is nothing like it was last October or November. We had 15,000 applications last week.”

In the week after the October bank holiday more than 32,000 people sought to book a test.

Much of the public furore last October stemmed from confusion at the extent to which a previously lightly-policed law would be enforced for all learner motorists.

A Garda spokesman said last night the law on unaccompanied driving would be enforced in an “appropriate and proportional manner”. No checkpoints targeting unaccompanied learner drivers were in place yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Garda Traffic Corps said.

“It is too early to say how many drivers were detected driving unaccompanied,” she added.