11,000 UK driving licences exchanged for Irish ones since January

More than 11,000 UK driving licences have been exchanged for Irish licences since the start of the year - almost double the total for last year.

The Road Safety Authority said 11,000 UK licences had been switched up to March 19, with another 4,000 applications currently being dealt with. The total number of UK licences switched to their Irish equivalent last year was 6,500.

The RSA has drafted in extra staff and the various National Driving Licence Service (NDLS) centres have extended their opening hours to cater for demand.

The RSA has flagged the need for UK licence holders to switch ahead of Brexit as they would be invalid in a no-deal scenario.

However, were a UK licence holder to be involved in an accident after a no-deal Brexit, it is understood their insurance policy will still be honoured.

A spokesperson for the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland said: “The MIBI understands that insurance policies will still remain valid in those circumstances but we would encourage anyone concerned about the impact to contact their insurance provider. As the NDLS has advised there will be other implications involved for those affected as this is a regulatory matter.”

RSA spokesman Brian Farrell said the rate of applications for Irish driving licences from those holding licences from the UK has now reached 600 a day.

“There is nothing that gives us cause for concern to meet demand,” he said. “We did put in extra resources to deal with this. We are coping with what is coming in.”

Those additional measures include 38 staff working exclusively on UK-to-Irish driving licences, working overtime and through weekends.

The NDLS centres have also assisted by extending opening hours, either by opening or closing an hour earlier, or both.

However, Brian Farrell said any queues at centres were likely down to people being unaware of the extended opening hours.

Typically, half of all appointments are allocated to walk-in clients which tend to be at lunchtime when centres are at their busiest.

However, the RSA said that between 8am and 9am last Tuesday just 42 applications were made and between 5pm and 6.30pm on the same day just 13 applications to switch licences were received.

“People just need to be aware that there are extended opening hours,” Mr Farrell said.

The typical turnaround time on a licence application is 10 working days, meaning some motorists may face an anxious wait if the UK crashes out of the European Union without an agreement on March 29.