Driving test instructors have criticised claims by the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, that driving tests will be available 'virtually on demand' by next spring.
Mr Dempsey said today that efforts by his department to reduce the waiting list were working, and that waiting times had been reduced from an average of 33 weeks to 22 weeks.
He also said he hoped that the waiting times will be further reduced to ten weeks by February 2008, adding that speeding up the waiting times was the only way to get provisional drivers off Irish roads.
The General Managing of the Irish School of Motoring, Karl Walsh, said the Government was fighting a losing battle, because the fail rates for driving tests were still at 50%.
Meanwhile, an independent review of road safety in Northern Ireland has found that thousands of people may be passing their driving tests without achieving the required standards.
The report also concluded that tens of thousands of Northern drivers, who broke the speed limit, were not penalised.
The audit office, which monitors public spending in Northern Ireland, focused on the road safety strategy of 2005 and estimated that over 40,000 speeding motorists in the North were not penalised with fines or driving bans because the police did not have the capacity to process all the cases.
The report said cameras had been set to record only high breaches of the speed limits, to prevent the processing centre being overload.
The audit office said it was of significant concern that the PSNI was unable to provide enough cameras, or meet the UK guidelines on speed enforcement.
The independent review also concluded that up to 5,000 people a year in the North could be passing their driving test without meeting the proper standards.
And, it also found that significantly fewer people passed their test when the examiner was being overseen by another tester in the rear seat.
