Car insurance is not optional – but not everybody understands that.

I was party to a conversation recently where I heard a story that more than surprised me. It concerned a young, well educated, professional lady who is thirty years of age. She graduated from university with an honours degree and is employed in a management role in the IT industry. She is a bright lady by any standards.

In the course of the conversation she revealed that she had stayed in the city overnight and had borrowed a friend’s car to get home to Midleton the following morning. She has a provisional drivers licence and she drove the car without being covered by insurance.

She said she had tried to contact the insurance company to arrange cover but she couldn’t get through to them so as far as she was concerned there wasn’t a lot more she could do, so she just drove home. When I pointed out the seriousness of what she had done, she simply shrugged her shoulders and stated that she didn’t think that it was such a big deal.

I pointed out to her what could have happened had she been stopped by the gardai or the consequences for her if she had been involved in a traffic accident while driving without insurance and she was genuinely shocked. I explained that her car could have been impounded and there could have been a court appearance, a fine, penalty points, difficulty in getting insurance again and the stigma of being convicted of driving a car while uninsured. At this point, she was close to tears.

I also explained to her the legal obligation on every driver to be insured before he or she takes a car out onto the public road and the purpose of that insurance. I advised her of her moral obligation also to be insured and that she had a responsibility to make sure that other road users would be taken care of if she was found to be responsible for an accident.

I reminded her of what could happen to a child, like her own, if there was no insurance available to cover his/her medical costs following an accident. At that stage the tears were beginning to flow.

I told her about the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland and what it is that they do and how they look after people injured as a result of being in an accident with an uninsured driver. I also explained to her how that facility is financed and how every insured driver contributes to the fund and how responsible drivers are paying because other people drive without insurance.

For me, the most surprising and worrying aspect of this little tale is the fact that this woman didn’t see anything wrong with what she was doing. She does not fit your normal criminal profile and she is a law abiding, decent, considerate person who likes to do the right thing. So, if she doesn’t see anything wrong, how many more think that motor insurance is like health cover? How many believe that it’s up to the individual to decide whether they want to be insured or not?

In my younger days, we had all sorts of cars on the road in various states of repair. We took chances on driving cars that would have difficulty stopping in any kind of emergency. We drove cars that had dodgy tyres and we took chances driving at night when the lights weren’t working and we could hardly see where we were going.

I drove a Morris 1100 through Midleton in the early seventies when the entire exhaust fell off the car in the main street. I drove that car in the rain when I had zero visibility because the one remaining windscreen wiper wasn’t working properly.

But the one thing we never did was to take a car out on to the public road without having some form of insurance. No matter where it was you wanted to go and no matter how important the journey was, you didn’t drive it without insurance. It was drilled into us from an early age that insurance was so important that it just wasn’t an option not to have it.

The Motor Insurers Bureau of Ireland said there has been a “significant increase” in the estimated number of uninsured private vehicles on the road, with the figure growing by more than 32,000 in 2016. That represents an 85 per cent increase since 2011.

In 2011, there were about 85,000 uninsured private vehicles in Ireland, which represented 4.5 per cent of the total. That number has jumped to 150,000.
The total number of uninsured private vehicles dropped in 2012 and 2013, but the figure grew considerably in 2014, 2015 and throughout 2016 and it is now almost double what it was a few years ago.

So that would seem to indicate that there has been a dramatic change in attitude to how people view car insurance. There are, obviously, a significant number of people who believe that it is optional. It isn’t, it is a legal requirement. It is there to provide protection to everybody from the costs associated with personal injury and damage to property as a result of an accident.

The costs associated with insurance claims in this jurisdiction are substantial. Ultimately, claims arising from accidents involving uninsured drivers will be funded by the insurance industry and they will pass those costs on to us, the consumer, so we end up paying for it in the long run.

There are probably people driving without insurance today because they can’t afford it. But by doing so they are contributing to the rising cost of motor insurance which will make it unaffordable for even more drivers. This means more uninsured drivers joining the party so the problem keeps growing.