National Bike Test

There was bike testing plans and thankfully they were scrapped..

'What is wrong with using the many motorcycle dealers/workshops, (spread all over the country)'

Because some of these have a local monopoly & know only too well how to rip off customers beacuse they have no choice to use them. Are you in a big city with multiple bike shops available??

for shops yes, for owners not so much.

France have already said No to this, as have Finland, NL is (I think) about to as well. Belgium don't have one.

Makes zero sense here economically, and much like NCT's for cars, we've yet to see any evidence that poor maintenance has a measurable effect on accident statistics.

All you have to do is look at the Garda Twitter account and see vehicles -with NCT & DoE - regularly failing roadside inspection for things like tyres, brakes, lights. So adding a bureaucratic and cost layer to motorcycling won't be any different.

That and the fact who would YOU let work/inspect your bike... ?

Bike mechanic numbers are thin on the ground. If they add this to the NCT, what standard do they use? Who is going to be trained to do the inspecting - the car testers ? Would those testers need to be motorbike trained/licensed - would take a lot of time to implement should the authorities decide to proceed.

aye, there's the thing too.

Every NCT tester has a car licence - legal requirement.

How many have bike licences ?......

Of course, I could dust down my bike credentials from the top shelf (gathering dust), for a ridiculous fee :)

I'd imagine the car industry would then want car garages to do NCT on cars, so that's a can of worms any Dept would want to stay well away from. The contract to Applus is hundreds of millions of Euro, and they're not going to lie down on it either.

And remember, how many of us own multiple bikes ... ?

The MOT is riddled with corruption, they have a big market so you can always find a place to pass your vehicle, and have a look at our old DOE, to see what happens in a small market with mandatory testing. Even Northern Ireland went with an NCT like setup for their car testing instead of MOT and that is why are we have the CVRT setup like the NCT.

The amount of cars I see which aren't safe is massive and we've had the NCT for years, look at the tyres next time your in a supermarket. If the operators aren't checking their vehicles regularly then how often should we have a mandatory inspection? Because talk to any mechanic and they'll tell you that people only fix issues for the NCT.

The only system that works is the NCT, but we don't have enough bikes here to make it viable for a company to do this, and the NCT only proves that the car passed the checks they do on the day the test was done, it's possible to make a car dangerous driving out of the NCT centre and it could be driven for 27 months like this. If we are to do checks as said road side checks of ALL vehicles should be done, the RSA already do this for HGV's and buses it can easily be extended to cars and bikes.

An annual check is not much better, its OK for 1 day of the year the other 364 it can be a death trap.

That's like saying the government should ban crime 🙄

Such tests are not required and we're not the only EU country opting out of them.

There's a shortage of competent bike mechanics in the country already. I don't want some gimp with a one week training course moving my bike around or riding it around a test centre.

Plenty of iffy stuff happening with the NCT already, I had the wife's car failed once due to "brake pad wear" front and rear supposedly, it was easily seen without removing the wheels that the front pads were well within spec (less than half worn), the rear pads can't be checked without removing the wheels but when I did it was obvious the pads were almost like new. So this guy's x-ray vision must have been a bit off that day... 🙄

On the issue of 'local' shops, what local shops ?

There is almost none west of the Shannon - you can't expect people to travel 100's of kms for a test in any case.

No, another layer of rubbish and cost (like we don't pay enough for everything already) that will achieve almost nothing useful and will just annoy people.