Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has called for a six-month stay on the introduction of new laws regulating drivers with provisional licences.
Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, has been under fire after he announced a series of measures including a ban on motorists with a second provisional licence from driving unaccompanied from October 30th.
"Ironically there is widespread political and public acceptance of the need to removal the anomaly in our driver system that allowed the holder of a second provisional licence to drive without having to be accompanied by a full licence holder," Mr Gilmore said in a statement released this afternoon.
The changes announced on Thursday with the publication of the new Road Safety Strategy include penalties against provisional license holders who drive unaccompanied with fines of €1,000 upon conviction.
"It was never going to be feasible to introduce such a major change in our licence regime at four days notice, especially over a bank holiday weekend. People were confronted by advertisements on Friday morning essentially telling them that if they drove to work on Tuesday morning, as they had been doing up to this, they would be breaking the law," Mr Gilmore said.
"The only way out of this shambles is for this change to be deferred for a specific period of time - certainly at least six months - to allow it to be phased in and to permit those with second licences to apply for and take their driving tests," Mr Gilmore concluded.
Mr Dempsey issued a statement last night claiming that gardaí will approach each case using "discretion" and "common sense" as opposed to automatic prosecution for a period of two or three months.