Carlow has one of the longest waiting lists in the country for the driving test.
It’s among 15 centres with 1,000 people or more waiting to take the test.
The covid pandemic is being blamed for the backlogs. (See our story from February here).
There are over 92,500 driving test applications in the Road Safety Authority’s system at the moment; over 10,000 of these have a scheduled appointment, another 24,500 applications have been deemed ineligible – normally because the drivers haven’t taken enough lessons.
The other 57,600 are eligible for a test but are on the waiting list.
Brian Farrell from the Road Safety Authority says it will take several months to clear the backlog, noting “We’re hoping to be in a situation where we’re at a national average waiting time of around 12 weeks in February of next year and that will go some way towards providing driving tests within a reasonable period at the height of the closure of the service we were telling people that they would be expecting waiting times of anything up to six months or more so we are making progress”.
Other centres with over 1,000 on their waiting lists include venues in Cork, Galway, Kildare, Limerick, Louth, Meath and Waterford.
