Ballina • Castlebar • Co. Mayo

Ripchord Driving School

High quality EDT driving lessons, from your first lesson to the day you drive away on your own.

Behind the wheel, together

I had a young one out past Foxford one wet Thursday, and she could steer, brake and change a gear without a bother on her. What she could not do was believe the road would still be there on the far side of the bend. That believing is the slow part, and it is most of what a good instructor is for. There's no rush on it, and there was none that evening.

I have been the better part of thirty years in the passenger seat now, and driving a coach for a living before that, which means I have read most of the roads in this county in weather that would keep a sensible person at home. Ripchord runs the Road Safety Authority's Essential Driver Training, the twelve lessons every learner has to log, out of Ballina, with a satellite over in Castlebar. These pages are here to walk you from that first nervous lesson to the morning the licence lands and the real learning starts. Nothing on them is for sale.

What you get out here

The mock comes before the real one

No logbook gets signed in this car until a full mock run tells me you would pass. If you are not ready, you hear it from me, and that is a far cheaper place to hear it than from an examiner on the morning.

The one instructor, the same one

You are taught by the one man who remembers what caught you out last week, and the week before that. Not a new face each lesson working off the same laminated sheet.

A pass rate earned the slow way

Plenty of people fail the test the first time, and most of them were rushed to it. The ones who pass are usually the ones who put in the dull, repeated hours. You'll know it when your hands know it, and not a lesson before.

Your sponsor sits in too

The person who signs off your practice hours sits in with us before a single lesson goes ahead. If they picked up a bad habit of their own back in 1994, far better we find it now than have it quietly passed on to you.

We give the road more than the lesson asks

We follow the RSA's EDT syllabus to the letter, and we write real notes in your logbook, the kind you can read back, not a row of ticks. What we will not do is sign you off and send you away to circle a quiet estate on your own, with nobody watching whether the habit forming is a good one. Practice is half of it, and practice done wrong is worse than none at all. It is the slow, honest hours that turn a learner into a driver. The road tells you before the car does, and it only tells the ones who are listening.

2kLearners taught

300+Tests sat with us

27yrsOn the RSA register

Why learners stay with Ripchord

Taught by a man who watched it go wrong

Every fault the test marks, I have seen happen first from the passenger seat, on a real road, with a real learner. That is worth more than any sheet. I can tell you what a mistake looks like a second before it arrives.

Priced like a driving school, not a boutique

Good instruction at a fair price. I keep it as reasonable as I honestly can, and I will not turn your lessons into a conveyor belt to do it.

Test day, made ordinary

By the time the test comes, it should be no more than another lesson with a quieter passenger beside you. Calm is not a thing you find at five to eleven on the morning. It is the repetition, wearing a good suit.

Straight talk, the whole way through

Notes, mock runs, and a plain word about where you actually stand. No mystery and no false comfort. You will always know the one thing that still wants work.

What we do

I do the core ADI and EDT training myself, and I bring in a specialist where a specialist is the honest answer. Here is the short of it.