Fewer than 10% of people who have been disqualified from driving since the beginning of last year have given up their licences, new figures reveal.
All told, 11,468 licences, learners and fully qualified drivers, have been disqualified since the start of 2024.
Just 730 (6.4%) of those licenceshad been surrendered to the Road Safety Authorityby the end of February this year.
When a driver is disqualified, they are required to surrender their physical licence to the RSA, with the agency then returning the document when the disqualification period ends.
In practice, the new figures, which were released by the Department of Transport to Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly, show licences are rarely surrendered by the drivers in question, calling into question the effectiveness of the system aimed at keeping disqualified licence-holders off the roads.
Mr Farrelly described the situation as exhibiting “a glaring weakness in controls”. He said the courts and the RSA “have to arrive at a solution that addresses this matter”.
The problem is particularly stark in terms of learner drivers on provisional licences who have yet to pass their driving test.
Of the 2,118 such provisional drivers disqualified from the roads since the start of 2024, just 84, or 3.9%, subsequently surrendered their licence to the RSA.
The surrender rate for fully licenced drivers is marginally better, with 6.9% of the 9,350 who were disqualified giving their licence up.
The worst compliance rate in the country was noted in Dublin, where just 3.56% of 3,174 disqualified licences were collected by the RSA.
The rate in Cork was 10% of 1,225 licences being surrendered.
Minister for transport Darragh O’Brien said while the non-surrender of licences was “of concern”, the “more important issue from a road safety perspective is that the disqualification from driving is observed”.
However, there is some debate as to whether or not gardaí are in a position to adequately identify disqualified drivers at on-road checkpoints, given the National Vehicle and Driver File database is not updated on a daily basis.
Similarly, while insurers now have access to disqualification data when evaluating applications to purchase insurance, they are also dependent on the same dataset, which may be out of date.
A spokesperson for the RSA said when a licence is ordered for disqualification — such as via a court order, or when the penalty point threshold of 12 is breached — the driver remains disqualified regardless of whether or not the licence is surrendered.
When that disqualification period expires, the licence is posted back to the driver by the National Driver Licensing Service. Should someone lose their licence as a result of penalty points, they are expected to renew the licence even when disqualified in order to serve the time-ban in full.
An Garda Síochána did not reply to a request for comment regarding the disqualification process.
Road safety bodies such as Parc have previously called for gardaí to be given better access to information in terms of disqualified drivers, arguing for real-time data to be made available on Garda mobile devices, similar to the way in which uninsured cars can be automatically detected.
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