Motorists caught driving while disqualified from the road can be arrested on the spot under new powers available to An Garda Síochána from next week.

Currently, those caught driving while disqualified can only be served with a summons, and the case can take months to get to court.

Minister for Paschal Donohoe is to sign a new order to allow Gardaí to arrest such drivers on the spot and to bring them to court the next day, or even the same day if a court is available.

The new rules will come into effect from Monday. The penalty for driving while disqualified is a fine of as much as € 5,000 and/or a maximum of six months in prison.

Mr Donohoe said an average of 10 per cent of disqualified motorists are later prosecuted for driving per year, adding: “Drivers not surrendering their licences to the licensing authority and continuing to drive while disqualified has been identified as an issue that needs to be tackled”.

Around 13,000 drivers have been disqualified from driving in each of the past two years, with almost 6,000 so far in 2015. The number of people prosecuted for driving after they had been disqualified in 2014 was 1,392; 1,286 in 2013; and 592 so far this year.

The Minister said continuing to drive while disqualified is “a serious and unacceptable offence”. People who do so are “blatantly disregarding the sanction imposed by the court for another offence or offences which have put them off the road and should be dealt with severely”.

“Driving while disqualified, like all forms of unlicensed driving, is already an offence. It is a particularly serious form of unlicensed driving, because people in such cases have been explicitly barred from driving, generally for road traffic offences, which means that they have posed a danger on the roads.

“The new power of arrest represents the seriousness of the offence and provides An Garda Síochána with the necessary power to deal swiftly with this offence.

“I expect that this will have a very significant deterrent effect for persons who drive while disqualified and ultimately enhance safety on our roads.”