In my Private Members' time in the Seanad on 18 April 2000, I proposed this motion: 

That Seanad Éireann, mindful of the continuing failure to cope with the backlog of driving tests, calls on the Government to privatise this function before 1 October 2000, and to impose on the agency, so created, a series of strict performance measures

It is one of the ironies of politics that the nastiest jobs go to the nicest people. One of the people in this Government for whom I feel sorry is the Minister with responsibility for the issue of Sellafield who must go through the motions of playing to the gallery without doing it so loudly that the people in London might notice. Similarly, I have immense sympathy for the Minister responsible for driving tests on whom the task has been foisted, as he knows all too well, of defending the indefensible.

The Minister is not only one of the nicest people in Irish politics, he is also a person of immense political and ministerial experience and is well able to carry out his such chores as this with magisterial indifference. He is a past master in sticking to his brief while at the same time leaving no one in any doubt of his disdain for it. This evening I invite him to live a little more dangerously and to move into what I would call uncharted territory. This is a territory into which few in political life dare to venture. It is a place where someone admits that they got it wrong and must do it differently.

We are here to discuss the scandal of driving tests. Compared to some of the other matters going on around us as lately as this evening, it is perhaps only a mini-scandal but a scandal nonetheless because motor cars are dangerous objects. In this country alone, they kill close on 500 people every year, far more than were ever killed in Northern Ireland, even at the height of the troubles.

It is recognised worldwide that the responsibility of driving a car is not to be taken lightly. That is why we have licensing regimes. We do not tell people, willy-nilly, that they can buy a car, go ahead and drive it. Rightly, we tell them they can have a car but that they must prove they can drive it safely and then they will be let loose on our roads. That in a nutshell is the theory of licensing to which we all subscribe - the right to drive a car depends on being able to prove that one is able to do so.

So much for the theory - what about the practice?

Thanks to the failure of the system under the Minister's control, nearly 400,000 people driving cars have either not taken the driving test or have taken the test and failed it. A total of 400,000 people is not a trivial number. As a proportion of the total driving population, it is highly significant. It means that as you drive along, two out of every ten drivers you meet have never passed the test.

One of the red herrings waved at us later will be that there is no evidence that these 400,000 are a safety hazard on the roads. That is like saying there is no evidence that smoking is bad for you. If we really believed that 400,000 unqualified drivers were no danger, we would save a lot of trouble and money by abolishing driving licences altogether. That is the logical conclusion of arguing that those unqualified drivers do not matter. No one, having thought about it, would be very happy taking that route.

Currently, there are over 90,000 people waiting for a driving test. The Minister of State will give us the exact figure down to the last decimal point. The average waiting time for these people is eight months. You can get a hip replacement quicker than a driving test but at least once you receive a new hip, you have it, but if you take a driving test, you may come out of it unqualified.

Roughly half of the people who sit driving tests fail them. This means they have to go through the process again. That is not the Minister's fault but it throws the total failure of the system into greater relief, because the people who fail the test and start the process have to go to the end of the queue and start the process over again. It is crazy that one can drive on a provisional licence for up to five years. The fact that one can no longer do it for the rest of one's life has been presented as progress, a step in the right direction, but I prefer to see it as a confession of failure.

There is a ritual associated with this problem, part of which, no doubt, will be enacted again here. In both Houses of the Oireachtas, debates on this subject are quite common but part of the ritual is that the Minister presents a whole clatter of statistics aimed at defending the indefensible.

Part of this sob story is to show how the demand for driving tests has increased during the 1990s, which is clearly a fact, and I am sure we will hear about it. It is also a fact that the driving licence system failed to respond adequately to that change.

The next part is how an adequate response to the problem was thwarted by the big, bad trade unions who held the Department up to ransom for years when it wanted to expand the service. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that encounter, there was a serious industrial relations problem and failure in the driving test system.

All that is now in the past and now we emerge into the sunny uplands. The number of testers has been increased by over 50% and wonderful productivity agreements have been entered into. The upshot now is that there are 101 driving testers whom the Minister will have us believe are capable of doing 200,000 tests a year.

Let us leave aside the fact that in the United Kingdom, where they are no slouches on the issue of road safety, they would expect only about half that number of tests from 100 testers.Let us give the Minister's system the benefit of the doubt and say perhaps it is possible.

What is the light at the end of the tunnel that the Minister is promising? By the end of the year the average wait will be down to ten weeks. The Minister, as part of this hallowed ritual through which we are going this evening, will attempt to suggest, with a straight face, that a ten week delay is perfection. Compared to eight months it is a huge improvement but is it the height of our ambitions? Such a standard of service is quite ridiculous.

Let us cut to the chase.

When we sweep away all the excuses, all the waves of statistics, the fact remains that the present system has utterly failed.

That is why I am saying that we should consider privatising it. We have already privatised the national car test so there can be no ideological objection to it. I have no ideological view on this. Let us see if it works and go with it. If something does not work, let us try something else.

No one could argue that the present driving test system works. It has failed the nation utterly and instead of listening to a further litany of excuses and giving the Minister yet another ration of time to purge his contempt, we should say instead that enough is enough. The time has come to try something else.

Let us see if there is another way. We should either privatise the system completely, like the car testing system, or we should set up a State agency like the Driving Standards Agency in Britain, which is under the State umbrella but which must also adhere to the most stringent performance criteria and guarantees.

The time has come for action rather than more talk and I suggest this evening should be the start of doing something differently. It is our opportunity to do so.

Read the report of the full debate

Replying to the debate, I added:

This was a good debate from which I learnt much. I also learnt much from the Minster of State at the Department of the Environment and Local Government, Deputy Molloy. His statistics indicating that the 33 week waiting list has been reduced to 26 weeks is hardly a cause of pride. There have been 170,000 applications this year, an increase of 45% on four years ago. I understand the problems here.

I was most surprised by the failure rate. Some 59% of those doing the test pass on the first occasion. It means that 41% fail. Here, 41% of drivers have proved they cannot drive properly, yet they continue to drive on the roads. That worries me.

However, I was impressed by the Minister of State, Deputy Molloy. His heart is in the right place, but he defended the indefensible. He referred to the extraordinary increase in demand as if he wanted us to sympathise with him because he was doing his best. He knows the answer is marketplace, which would anticipate this increase in demand.

I do not have a hang-up about the marketplace being the right solution. Something must be done and the marketplace is one way in which demand can be anticipated. If we had adhered to the old system for telephones in the 1970s, it could not have handled the changes in that area. If we had left the airline business in the hands of one or two State owned carriers we could not have anticipated the number of people travelling by air.

It is actions that count. Approximately 500 people are killed on our roads every year and approximately 400,000 unqualified people drive on them. If we believe driver performance is an issue in road safety - as we must - then nobody could defend our system in absolute terms. They might defend it on the basis that it is the best way of dealing with problems as they stand, but nobody could claim that we could continue with it on a permanent basis.

The present system will never give us an acceptable result. There is another way. While we can talk about the way things were in the past, how they have been improved and the excuses for the present difficulties, we need to ask if we have confidence that this system can deliver what the country is entitled to expect in the immediate future. Regrettably, it cannot.

The facts force us to only one conclusion. We must find another way, whatever it is. It is not difficult. We do not have to make it up. It is there for us to copy and it can be done in the private sector or by a public-private sector partnership. It could also be done by a public sector agency that is bounded and tightly controlled by performance targets. Whatever way we favour, it could be up and running within months. It is not difficult - it is not rocket science. We can solve the problem almost immediately. Why do we not do so? I will take that question with me when I drive home tonight. I hope I drive very safely and that I do no bump into some of the 41% of drivers who failed their test but are permitted to continue to drive.

The Minister of State's heart is in the right place. He has shown it in the way he has tackled the taxi problem. This is his opportunity to grasp this issue and resolve it immediately.