The provisional driver has long been a scapegoat for our appalling road safety, writes Rosita Boland.
THIS TIME last October, there were 420,000 people on provisional driving licences in Ireland. Until last Thursday, I was one of them. I passed my test and emerged from that murky area in Irish life of being part social pariah, part of a long-standing Irish solution to an Irish problem, and - along with almost half a million other people - part of the collective cause of our horrible road fatality statistics.
The last day of this month is the final day that drivers on provisional licences will have a blind eye turned to them if driving unaccompanied. It will then be a legal offence to drive unaccompanied without a full licence. All this is a result of the Government finally doing something about the bizarre set-up that allowed people to drive around the country for years, even decades, without passing a driving test.
We've been drowning in statistics for months now. We know that the national average waiting time for a driving test last year was 28 weeks and that now it is eight. We also know that 230,360 people have applied for tests since last October, and that finally the backlog is being cleared.
This all has to be good news, because whatever way you look at it, almost half a million people without full driving licences was never an impressive statistic - even if it did take years for the cycle of inertia to finally be broken on both sides.
In my case, I started driving far, far later than my peers at a time when waiting lists for a test extended to a year. Although I've never suffered from nerves in my life, it was nerves that did me in three times when I sat and failed tests at Churchtown in Dublin.
I grew to loathe that suburban test route, and I also grew to loathe the tester who failed me three times running. Of course he didn't remember me, but I certainly remembered him, and his infuriating habit of pointedly hanging on to the passenger strap and sighing deeply throughout each test.
No offence to Churchtown, but when in late April I returned from six months in South America to the looming June 30th deadline, I couldn't face going back there for another test. Thus I applied for a test in my home town of Ennis, Co Clare.
Break the duck. A new route. Different mindset.
And thanks to pre-test lessons with Ennis driving instructor Elizabeth McInerney, who swiftly identified and killed off my nerves, I passed.
Now, as a fully licensed driver, I finally get to have my say about our terrible road safety record without the State's implicit assumption that, as a driver on a provisional licence, I am automatically contributing to the problem.
If anyone really believes that dramatically reducing the number of drivers on provisional licences will make a significant contribution to road safety statistics, they're quite wrong.
For a very long time, the provisional driver cohort has been a convenient scapegoat for far more fundamental problems on our roads. Such as speeding. Drink-driving. And flagrant disregard for even the most basic rules of the road.
During my test, while on the Ennis dual-carriageway bypass, a huge truck with an empty car-port trailer overtook on a white line. The tester beside me involuntarily sucked in his breath. It didn't faze me at all, because the truth is that I see criminally stupid and dangerous driving all the time when I travel around the country.
In rural Donegal last year, I was overtaken at night on a hump-backed bridge by a teenager riding an unlit quad bike, a vehicle intended for use only off-road. I have a million stories like that, except all the others involve on-road vehicles. It appears to be entirely routine in this country to consistently drive way over the speed limit, to overtake on white lines, on bends and in places of reduced visibility, and to never use indicators, particularly on roundabouts.
Having been pretty sensitive to the fact that I had L-plates on my own car, I kept a keen eye on the status of other drivers around me, and, funnily enough, very rarely observed any cars with L-plates doing all this illegal stuff.
I once wrote an article on a volunteer fire-brigade service in Belmullet, Co Mayo, and in the process was shown how cutting equipment can have the roof off a car faster than you could open a tin of sardines. I never forgot that demonstration of how simultaneously dangerous and fragile a car is. Every time I get into a car, as either passenger or driver, it fleetingly crosses my mind that I might not get out of it alive. After all, last year, 338 people in Ireland didn't.
The end of the everlasting provisional licence is definitely a good thing, as is the dramatic reduction in waiting times for driving tests.
The fact is, since so many fully-licensed drivers seem to accept so little responsibility for the way they use the roads, now that the Government is due to crack down on unaccompanied provisional drivers, they really need to focus on making sure all drivers obey the rules of the road.
Only then might we see our road fatality statistics drop significantly.
Rosita Boland is anIrish Times journalist