A new programme would help learner drivers get their practice in – legally and more safely – between lessons

When Michelle Williams started learning to drive, her instructor told her she needed to practise between her 12 mandatory lessons if she was going to pass the test.

To do that legally, she’d have to find a car, and an experienced, licensed driver who’d go along with her.

For Williams, like many other learner drivers, that was a struggle – and she didn’t get out much.

She failed the test three times between 2022 and this year, when she passed on the fourth try. “It was a long slog, it was awful,” Williams said last week

“The driving test is set up for 17-year-olds living at home with their parents, and maybe one parent’s not working and has plenty of spare time,” she says.

Even though it’s illegal, even though they could face fines, or have the car they’re driving seized, even though they are putting others at risk, many learners simply drive on their own.

So Aidan Jordan and Cliodhna Jordan are trying to get a social enterprise off the ground that would provide an insured car, and a fully licensed driver, to help learners who don’t have access to these to practise more safely in the lead-up to their tests.

“This programme would be the first of its kind in Ireland,” Cliodhna Jordan said during a presentation they gave in March to the Professional Driving Instructors Association.

It’s modelled after what’s done in Australia, and they’re calling it the Learner Driver Support Programme.

The problem

Learner drivers are more likely to get involved in serious crashes when they don’t have an experienced driver with them, according to the Road Safety Authority (RSA).

“According to our statistics, 74% of fatal crashes involving learner drivers in a four-year period involved unaccompanied learner drivers,” its website says.

Still, it is relatively common for learners to drive unaccompanied in Ireland.

The Road Safety Authority (RSA) hasn’t sent an answer to a query sent 4 April asking whether it has done research into exactly how common – despite promises to do so.

The Department of Transport referred a query on this to An Garda Síochána, which hasn’t sent a reply yet to a query sent Thursday.

But in 2012, in an operation targeting learner drivers, Gardaí checked 2,200 and found that 43 percent were not accompanied by a fully licensed, experienced driver.

In 2015, Susan Gleeson, an unaccompanied learner driver, hit a car carrying Geraldine Clancy and her daughter Louise, who died. Gleeson pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and was given a three-year suspended sentence and banned from driving for 15 years.

After a campaign by Noel Clancy, Geraldine’s husband and Louise’s father, the government in 2018 brought in the “Clancy Amendment”, allowing the guards to seize the car an unaccompanied learner is driving.

The government doubled the fine for learners driving unaccompanied, from €80 to €160, in 2022.

But there’s still “very much a blasé attitude towards driving unaccompanied, which is generally accepted in Ireland, unfortunately”, says Aidan Jordan, who is a professional driving instructor, in addition to working to launch the LDSP.

On Reddit last year, a user calling themselves MinuteSad7491, said they were a learner driver and had failed their test, but regularly drove anyway.

“Has it crossed your mind that maybe you shouldn’t be driving if you can’t pass the test?” another user asked.

“Why can’t I drive? Just because I failed?” MinuteSad7491 asked. “That would make me a worse driver due to lack of practice, there’s plenty of drivers worse than me that do speeding etc.. and somehow I’m not allowed to drive because I’m a learner?”

The struggle

The RSA’s road safety strategy includes the action “Eliminate the incidence of unaccompanied learner permit drivers” with a “due date” of “Q4 2024”.

It hasn’t replied to queries on the best way to accomplish that, and whether it’s on track to do it by the end of the year.

Clearly, there is a segment of learners who don’t think it’s a big deal to drive unaccompanied.

In its submission to the Oireachtas committee last month, when focusing on how to eliminate dangerous driving behaviours the RSA pointed to the need for more enforcement by Gardaí.

There is another group of learners who want to follow the law, and practise with an experienced driver, but struggle to arrange this – like Williams, the driver who passed her test on the fourth try.

Williams’s partner doesn’t drive or have a car, she says. At first, her brother would take her out for an hour every couple of weeks, but then his car broke down and he didn’t get another one.

“I was really at the mercy of kind-hearted people,” says Williams, 32, a public servant who lives in Dublin.

She totted up what it’d cost to pay for more lessons to get practice that way, and to register for tests she felt she’d surely fail, and decided it’d make sense to just buy a car for €4,000.

“Then the problem became, how do I get someone to come sit in the car with me?” she says. “People have busy lives.”

She got up her courage and talked a couple of people into it, but sometimes “people I drove with, my learning style and their teaching style didn’t mesh”.

“It’s easy to get frustrated with each other, and that can affect a friendship,” Williams says.

She posted on Reddit, looking for people to drive with her, but then got scared. “I don’t want to be kidnapped by a stranger from the internet,” she says.

Andrew Nolan, too, has struggled to find a way to get practise in with an experienced driver, he said by phone last week.

He’s from Kildare, and lives in Kildare, but says he doesn’t really have anyone he can practise with.

“I tried practising with my mother, but she’s too much of an overthinker,” said Nolan. “I can feel how stressed she is and that makes me more stressed.”

So Nolan’s just paying for more lessons to get his practice in, he says. “I know a lot of other people who have no support whatsoever.”

The plan

Cliodhna and Aidan Jordan have been thinking for a long time about how to make learning to drive safer.

He’s a long-time driving professional driving instructor. She got an MSc from DCU in 2018, with a dissertation on the evaluation of the learner driver process in Ireland – and is also a chartered insurer, working for a reinsurance company.

The couple developed their plan for the Learner Drivers Support Programme through Social Entrepreneurs Ireland’s Ideas Academy, Aidan Jordan says.

They have a plan now. Next, they need money, he says.

To get a small office, one car on the road, and a team of volunteers, would take €100,000 a year, he says.

They want to get at least three years of funding before they launch, so they’re looking for €300,000, he says.

For that, he reckons they could help over 100 learner drivers like Williams and Nolan get their practice in legally and safely.

Jordan said the volunteer experienced drivers would be Garda vetted and go through a training before starting to go out with learners.

“You have to do it in a way that’s professionally organised and managed,” he said.

Both Williams, who doesn’t know the Jordans, and Nolan, who is one of Aidan Jordan’s students, say the Learner Driver Support Programme would be brilliant.

“That’d be amazing, that would have helped me so so much,” Williams says.

“I think what he’s proposing would have saved me a lot of stress,” Nolan says.