Crackdown on learner drivers ‘unworkable in rural areas’

TRANSPORT Minister Shane Ross is unfairly punishing drivers in rural Ireland under new proposals to crack down on unaccompanied learner drivers, independent TD Mattie McGrath has claimed.

Tipperary TD Mr McGrath has accused the Transport Minister of going ‘off the deep end’ in demonstrating a ‘detachment from rural life’.

He called on the minister to suspend plans to increase the severity of penalties for such drivers, and those who allow them use their vehicles. ‘This proposal is utterly disproportionate and will generate massive amounts of resentment in rural Ireland,’ he said.

His comments came after the Cabinet agreed to amend the Road Traffic Act, allowing for increased fines and the confiscation of vehicles, including farm vehicles.

The owners of vehicles which are found with an unaccompanied driver at the wheel face prosecution under the new provisions.

‘If Minister Ross is seriously suggesting a new regime whereby critical farm yard vehicles can be confiscated and the farmer can be jailed then he has truly gone off the deep end in terms of a detachment from rural life,’ Mr McGrath said.

‘How does the Minister intend to put this bizarre proposal into practice? It is completely unworkable and has the potential to ruin farm and working families that are barely surviving as it is.’

The Tipperary independent said he wants the Government to find ‘a more proportionate and effective response to the important issue of road safety that does not involve the excessive penalisation of one distinct element of the community, such as farmers and self-employed people’.

The Government’s move comes two years after Cork woman Geraldine Clancy, 58, and her daughter Louise, 22, were killed in a crash involving an unaccompanied learner driver. Geraldine’s widower Noel Clancy has called for more restrictions on unaccompanied learners and people who allow them to use their vehicles.