Ripchord Driving School
The Driving Lessons I Offer
I had a lad in with me one time who had driven lorries the length of the country for twenty years, and he arrived certain there was nothing left anyone could show him. He only wanted the left side of the road back under him after a long stretch abroad. By the second evening he was the first to say the roads out here ask harder questions than any motorway ever did. That is the whole of why I keep more than one kind of lesson going. Different drivers, different gaps, and no hurry putting a name on which is which.
Where I teach
Ripchord works out of Primrose Hill, a few blocks from the Ballina test centre in the Moy Valley Business Park, with a satellite over in Castlebar. That matters more than it reads. I teach on the roads you will be tested on, so nothing on the morning is a surprise you have to work out in front of an examiner. The road tells you before the car does, and it tells you soonest on a road you have already met.
The lessons I offer
I do the core ADI and EDT training myself, and I am honest with you about where I bring a specialist in. Between the lot of it, this is the widest range of driver training in the county. Here is what is on offer, with nothing padded onto it.
Train the driver training
I started bringing new instructors up to standard the guts of four years ago, the year I could not find anyone good enough for the Castlebar car and decided to grow my own. What it costs and how long it runs depend on what you walk in the door with. I keep it as fair as I honestly can.
Assisted driver training
Everyone has a right to the road and the same duty to share it once they are on it. I run specialist lessons for drivers who start at a disadvantage, to bring them through the RSA's basic test at a pace that suits them. If the ordinary route does not fit, we find the one that does.
Advanced driver training
EDT saved a great many lives, and it still only covers the ground floor. It says nothing about a motorway, nothing about snow and ice, nothing about a dark boreen you have never met with the light dropping out of the sky. This is for the roads that are genuinely dangerous, the ones a beginner's course was never built to teach.
Top-up driver training
For drivers landing in from Europe or the States who need the left side of the road under them, and for anyone trading an automatic for a proper manual gearbox. Whatever the gap in your driving is, we will close it, with no lecture about how you were taught it wrong somewhere else.
None of this comes with a shiny name on it. It is lessons, taught by the one man who remembers you from last week and the week before, aimed at getting you competent and keeping you that way long after the licence lands. If you are not sure which of these you want, that is a two-minute phone call, not a form. There's no rush on it.