The Road Safety Authority is to publish a guarantee next week that all second provisional driving licence holders will be able to take a test before a ban comes into affect next June.
The numbers of applications for tests received by the authority stood at 5,000 a week before Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey announced a plan last month to ban holders of second provisional licences from driving unless accompanied by a full licence holder.
The ban is to take effect next June.
Immediately following the announcement, applications for driving tests surged to 15,000 a week, but this number has now receded to previous levels, the authority told The Irish Times yesterday.
The number of applications stood at 122,000 before the crisis. The number last week stood at 158,000: 116,000 applications are with the Road Safety Authority and 42,000 more have been contracted out to the private contractor, SGS.
Currently, authority driver-testers and those employed by SGS are carrying out 6,000 tests a week, but this number will rise "in the new year" to 10,000, the authority said last evening.
The quickest places to get tests now are Donegal and Letterkenny, where the waiting period is now just seven weeks, while Navan, Nenagh and Monaghan are just one week longer.
However, the 595 people currently in the queue in Clifden, Co. Galway, can expect to wait 39 weeks; while the wait in Wicklow is 29 weeks. Provisional licence holders who have applied for tests in Athlone, Raheny and Skibbereen will wait 28 weeks.
Some of these waiting times will have to fall if Mr Dempsey is to honour his pledge that all second provisional holders will be tested before the tougher rules come into place on June 30th.
"We are going to be making a statement next week about the target set by the Minister as to how the backlog will be dealt with," the Road Safety Authority spokesman said. "That means exactly how it will be met."
Given, however, that 50 per cent of applicants fail their tests and that there are 430,000 provisional licences holders, it is clear that not all of them can be tested in time, even with test numbers increasing.
Forty thousand are on their fifth licence.
Discussions are under way with the State-employed driver-testers' union Impact to get them to increase the number of driving tests they carry out. Currently, they are paid overtime for evening and weekend tests.
