Three-quarters of the children suffering from brain injuries at the National Rehabilitation Hospital are victims of road crashes.
Consultant in rehabilitation medicine Dr Mark Delargy said yesterday that six of the eight children being cared for at the hospital's paediatric unit in Dublin were crash victims undergoing rehabilitation for brain injuries.
Dr Delargy told a conference on road deaths, organised by the Safe Driving Pledge campaign, that of the 120 patients now being cared for at the hospital, 26 were survivors of crashes. The waiting list was between 150 and 200 people.
He said because more people were surviving crashes through advances in medical care, the health service would have to find long-term beds for the young people who survived.
Bob Spagnoli, from the New Triet High School in Winnetka, Illinois, said that teenage road deaths fell in US states where graduated driver-licensing was in operation.
Under the graduated driver-licensing system, new drivers go through a three-stage process involving their gradual introduction to full driving privileges.
By restricting when teenagers could drive and with whom, graduated driver-licensing allowed new drivers to gain much needed on-the-road experience in controlled, lower-risk settings, Mr Spagnoli said.
Minister of State for Transport Pat "The Cope" Gallagher said that the Minister for Transport, Martin Cullen, was furious over the fact that the department was not able to outsource work to shorten the waiting time for driving tests following an arbitration board decision last week.
He said that there were currently 404,000 people driving with provisional licences, with 137,000 waiting to sit the driving test.
Director of the Irish School of Motoring John Walsh said there was a "rotten system" in place to teach people to drive.
"The theory test is a joke, the driving test is a joke and the waiting lists for tests are a joke.
"In Northern Ireland the average wait is seven weeks, with the maximum ten weeks."
