Garda gets power to seize cars driven by disqualified motorists

The Garda has been given powers to seize vehicles driven by disqualified drivers, the Minister for Transport, Shane Ross, has said.

He said also that he would be legislating to allow for the naming and shaming of disqualified drivers by means of a publicly accessible database identifying them and detailing the sentence of disqualification.

“That’s very important,” he said, “it’s not just a token measure. A lot of people disqualified [from driving] are in employment, some of them are professional drivers, their employers don’t know, their spouses don’t know, their neighbours don’t know.”

A register would mean they were outed in their community and would not be able to flout the law by ignoring their sentence “nearly so easily”.

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Mr Ross was speaking to RTÉ following yesterday's publication in The Irish Times of Road Safety Authority research showing that, based on data extant last August, close to 8,000 drivers banned for drunk driving and/or causing the death of another person by their driving, had ignored the consequences of their convictions and sentencing and carried on driving.

Professional drivers

The same research found that, in 2015, 1,767 disqualifications had been issued to drivers who had already been banned. In the 18-month period after January 2015, 700 professional drivers were banned but at least 100 of them carried on driving, a fact known because they received penalty points for further driving offences.

In the 2008 to 2012 period, banned drivers were shown to have been responsible for between 11 and 14 deaths per year. The research found that 97 to 98 per cent of banned drivers asked in writing to return their licences ignore the letter. Most are assumed to carry on driving.

Mr Ross said the figures were “absolutely shocking”.

“What we see here is a lawlessness which a lot of people were not aware of – that those who are disqualified are simply flouting the law, going out and driving willy-nilly, whether they have a licence or not. We are going to have to do something about that.”

Together with the power to seize a vehicle, Mr Ross said gardaí would also be given the power to arrest a disqualified driver caught driving, and he committed to taking stronger measures if necessary – “to ensure they are disqualified and it means it”. Gardaí have had the power to seize vehicles driven by uninsured drivers for some time but hitherto not vehicles driven by disqualified drivers.

The problem of disqualified drivers could also be lessened if insurance companies shared information and there was a central database they could access, industry experts said in reaction to the RSA research.

Conor Faughnan of the motoring organisation AA Ireland said there needed to be an integrated insurance data service so criminal drivers could be detected and kept off the roads.

“That information should be available – your insurance history, your driving licence status and your penalty point record,” he said. “The problem is that the existing insurance companies won’t – not can’t but won’t – do this and yet 90km up the road in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the UK they have this.”

Problematic

A senior figure in one of the major insurance companies, who asked not to be named, said that while companies could access the RSA’s penalty points database, creating a database of licences and convictions attaching to them was problematic.

“One of the challenges we face is there are strict data-protection laws in Ireland,” he said. “They are much stricter than in the UK and it prevents us, as an industry, storing information as in the UK.”

Mr Faughnan does not accept this.

“You’ll hear things like data protection but that’s just spurious,” he said.

Another industry source maintained that insurance companies were themselves resisting sharing licensing and drivers’ claims histories for self-interested commercial reasons and had failed for five years to create a system to share information out of “cynicism and laziness”.

The recently enacted Road Traffic Bill allows for an expansion of the Garda’s ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system to have access to more data. A spokesman for the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland, the industry-funded body which pays for the consequences of uninsured drivers, said this data might usefully include the data identified by the RSA research.

Mr Faughnan said it was “nuts and absurd” that proof of insurance and vehicle roadworthiness was dependent on windscreen-displayed paper that could be forged “by a child with a laptop”.

The solution was a central database on which all relevant information, including licence and disqualification information, was stored and readily accessible.