Driver Test Dail Éireann — 2021-06-17 ============================================================ Eamon Ryan (GP), Dublin Bay South Were the Deputy to send me a letter to that effect, I certainly would follow up. I will say a "Thank you" as well. Various people have kept working. While everyone has kept working in their own way through this pandemic, the staff in driving testing were able to do those 52,569 driving tests for essential purposes. That was an important part of keeping the country and the economy going, and I thank them. There are very significant additional resources being put in. Many of the new people are being trained by those permanent driving testers. I thank them and everyone in the theory test centres as they start to ramp up. It was only Covid that stopped us opening and it is only the efforts of the collective population getting the disease back to low numbers that is allowing us to reopen. Hopefully, we will clear this backlog in a matter of months. That will be a good news story for everyone. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-06-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:24+00:00 Sitting date: 2021-06-17