Almost 80 per cent of about 3,000 drivers disqualified by the courts in the first three months of this year did not have their bans automatically implemented because motorists did not provide their licence with their unique driver number.
Minister of State for Transport Seán Canney said the department received 2,877 individual court disqualification orders between January and March 31st “and of those, 2,260 [79 per cent] did not have a driver number”.
In such cases a manual search is undertaken to “attempt to match the record”. If this proves unsuccessful then a “shell” record is created on the National Vehicle and Driver File (NVDF), a database containing details of 2.9 million registered vehicles and their owners.
Mr Canney said some disqualified foreign licence holders drivers would not have an NVDF record. It was also not possible to match some Irish licence holders “to the appropriate driver record”.
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He said: “This shell record remains in place for the duration of the disqualification.”
But Susan Gray, of the Parc road safety campaign group, said “often the ban gets expunged once the disqualification period is over if they haven’t managed to match the licence holder. It disappears and it’s not on your record. Effectively it never existed”.
Many bans are for six months, and “a lot of the six-months’ disqualifications will be finished before gardaí even know they were disqualified”, she said.
Mr Canney provided the figures in a parliamentary reply to Fine Gael TD Emer Currie.
The Dublin West TD said “the gaps in the system must be addressed so that accurate information is available to insurance companies and the gardaí to keep disqualified drivers off the road”.
She also said: “We’ve seen a big jump in the number of uninsured vehicles being seized since the new Irish Motor Insurance Database (IMID) and Garda mobility app were introduced last year. We need a system that works here too.”
The high number of motorists failing to present their licences is a long-term problem but, in a bid to rectify it, new regulations were introduced at the end of March requiring insurance companies to obtain driver numbers before providing cover.
The rules aim to capture driver numbers of all motorists and involve linking three databases – from the department, Insurance Ireland and IMID. These have, however, yet to be integrated.
Campaigner Ms Gray said the new regulations marked “the start of a process. We welcome it, but it’s only a start and not a job done. We want to know when the insurance companies and gardaí will have instant, real-time access to the Driver File”.
Mr Canney said: “This matter is the responsibility of An Garda Síochána, the Department of Justice and the Courts Service, but my department will be supportive of any measures [to] address the issue as it will improve our subsequent ability to match court orders to driver records.”
The Courts Service has, however, consistently said “a court registrar or any other member of staff can only record licence/permit details where the relevant documentation is produced to the court”.
Ms Gray, who has campaigned on road safety for more than two decades, said the Minister might say it was the responsibility of other agencies, but “we believe the Department of Transport and the RSA [Road Safety Authority] have a massive part to play in this. If they don’t get that information from the court they have to go through a whole process of trying to manually match it”.
She urged government departments, courts and agencies to “work together rather than blaming each other for the failure to secure a convicted motorist’s unique driver number in court. It’s in all their interests”.
