In 2002, the government of the day introduced penalty points into Ireland. The motivation was to encourage safe driving and reduce casualties on our roads.
But this morning Newstalk Breakfast can reveal that because of problems in the way the system was established, thousands of Irish drivers who have been issued penalty points in court, have never had those those points appear on their licence.
Listen to the on-air report in full below:
In the period since commencement of the penalty points system in 2002 up to 2013 there were 445,672 individual penalty points supplied by the Courts Service which could not be allocated to Irish driver records (just under 35,000 penalty points per year).
There are two ways you can get points - on payment or on conviction.
When someone receives a ‘penalty point notice’ and they accept the points and pay the fine, those are referred to as penalty points on payment. If someone doesn’t accept the points on foot of the notice, they are issued with a summons to appear in court. If and when they appear in court and are issued penalty points, those are referred to as penalty points on conviction and that is where the problem arises in relation to these approx. 450,000 points.
In order for points issued on conviction to appear on a licence, the National Vehicle Driver File (NVDF) within the Department of Transport needs to know the driver licence number. The Courts Service is responsible for passing on this information to the NVDF.
If a driver number is supplied - either Irish or foreign - the penalty points are endorsed on the licence in all situations.
The problem is where no driver licence is supplied. The Dept of Transport can't record penalty points against a licence if they don't have a licence number, which is what happened in the case of these 450,000.
Section 63 of the Road Traffic Act 2010 provides that a person convicted of a road traffic offence should produce both a valid licence and a copy of the licence to the court.
The Courts Service say that they are complying fully with that Act and ask every driver that appears for a copy of their licence. However that doesn’t mean they always get it.
A spokesperson for the Courts had this to say;
“The circumstances which give rise to the fact that a significant proportion of driving licence numbers cannot be provided to the Department of Transport can be attributed to:
1. At the court hearing relating to the alleged offence, the accused person in attendance does not produce his/her licence to the Court
2. A significant number of accused persons do not attend court for the hearing of their case in respect of penalty point offences. If an accused does not attend court for his/her case, obviously his/her driving licence number cannot be obtained by the court.
“The Courts Service is very conscious that many driving licences are not produced to the court as provided for in Section 63 and that failure to produce the driving licence constitutes an offence under Section 63. In this regard over the past 12 months the Service has been putting in place arrangements to ensure that prosecutions arising from such failure can be properly prosecuted. The Service will in the near future commence providing an Garda Siochana with details of the instances of the non production of driving licences. It will then be a matter for An Garda Siochana to commence the prosecutions.”
At the moment however the reality is that drivers can turn up in Court, without a copy of their licence, be issued penalty points and they'll disappear into the system.
