The Road Safety Authority (RSA) says it hopes to clear the backlog in driver theory tests by September.
More than 120,000 people are currently waiting to take the test after centres closed due to the pandemic.
However, today marks the reopening of those centres for in-person theory tests, in line with the easing of restrictions.
RSA spokesperson Brian Farrell says capacity will be limited to begin.
He said: “There is a cap of 25,000 driver theory tests that we can conduct in the centres per month, and we're hoping in time the Government will permit us to increase the number of theory tests to 50,000 per month, and we're quite confident that being able to ramp up to that level of capacity will go a long way towards eliminating the estimated backlog.”
