The Department of Transport has admitted it may be prevented from employing new driving testers to clear the huge backlog of licence applications due to an embargo on public service recruitment.
A spokesman for the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, said yesterday that the Minister was "looking at a number of options" to deal with the 41,000 new applications which have been received in the last fortnight.
But he said he did not know whether employing new testers would be possible.
"The embargo on public service jobs has to be taken into account. It simply may not be an option to employ new full-time testers at the present time."
The State's 116 testers are already working overtime, taking extra tests during lunch-time and working on Saturdays. According to Impact, the union representing driving testers, it is unlikely they could fit in any more tests.
Even if Mr Brennan were able to resolve the staff difficulties in the coming months, it is unlikely any new testers would be ready to help clear the backlog of 300,000 provisional licence holders, due to the length of time required for selection and training.
Impact said it not yet been contacted by the Department of Transport in relation to dealing with the backlog.
"We've had no discussion with management about how we're going to handle this. We don't even know what time-scale we'd be looking at to clear the backlog," Ms Louise O'Donnell of Impact said.
The union has worked with management over the past number of years to increase the number of testers, she said, and increase the number of tests given by each tester, but there had been a lack of funding for the service.
"We've always contended that the service is grossly underfunded" she said, "but even if new testers were employed straight away, other testers would have to be taken out of the system to train them up. If we had been given notice, we could have planned for this, but we weren't."
The selection and training process involved in employing new testers is particularly rigorous, according to the driver testing section of the Department of Transport in Ballina, and even if the process were put in train immediately, it would be late summer or autumn, at the earliest, before testers would be ready.
Starting pay for a tester is €25,000 per year rising to a maximum of €35,000. Overtime rates are not fixed but are negotiated with management on a fee per test basis, depending on the number of extra tests given. The amount of extra tests, however, depends on the time of year, as tests are not conducted after dark.
A spokesman for the Minister said Mr Brennan has pledged that once people have applied for the test, they will not lose their licence while waiting for a test date.
