Buying a car in Eire

Since we're staying in Ireland for several months in a rural
setting it seemed most sensible to buy a car rather than renting or
relying on public transit. There's two buses a day past the
Knockbrown house. Plus, it would cost E15 to get all 4 of us
to town and back.

Hmm. My keyboard doesn't have a euro character. How
crass of them to go off inventing a new character to represent their
money. Hasn't the EU heard of ASCII? I'll use 'E'
to represent the € until a better solution occurs to me.

A copy of the local Buy and Sell yielded quite a number of suitable
cars for reasonable (<E4000) prices. After weeding out
the ones that were already sold or too far away etc, I settled on a '93
MB 200TE owned by a very nice goldsmith from Midleton. He was
very helpful and patient while I struggled with the legal aspects of
vehicle ownership. That was the easy part. Be sure
to check out Muckley's Jewelery in Midleton next time you're
there. Very nice family business.

Most of the insurance companies will not insure anybody who doesn't
hold at least an Irish learners permit. Supposedly, under
permit you can only drive cars of less than 1.6L displacement with a
large red 'L' in the window, must have a fully licensed person
accompany you, and the insurance companies charge you a small
fortune. It takes weeks to get a date to take the test, and
weeks more to receive the permit. Oh, and you need a PSN
before you can take the test.

Now the PSN is like the US Social Security number, you get it to
identify yourself as a working member of the country, and collect
social security moneys from working. Needless to say, the
bureau of social services is reluctant to give a PSN to a person
holding a "No Working Here" visa.

To get a reasonable insurance rate, you need to hold a full license (2
months to get a drivers test appointment), and have something called a
"Zero Claims Bonus". You get this bonus certificate from your
previous insurance company by dropping your policy with them.

Into this morass of bureaucracy and corporate greed I stepped, having
kissed the Blarney stone for some much needed silver-tongued persuasion.

After working through several completely useless brokers (McCarthy's
and another I forget), and several companies, both in person on Cork's
South Mall, and by phone to those bloody anonymous call centers located
who knows where, I finally found my way round to Hibernian, where if I
could show a zero claims bonus, would insure me on my US license as if
I held a full Irish license, ie. with a somewhat less usurious
rate. Since US insurance co's don't provide a ZCB,
we engaged in a bit of subterfuge to provide a letter from my agent
indicating that I was worthy of same. This also involved
dropping Francie from the policy, as she was not, for several reasons,
worthy.

At long last, 3 weeks, 10 US phone calls (Yeah Skype!), a couple dozen
local calls, half a dozen faxes, another visit to the car to get vital
numbers and certificates, and E800, I had a receipt for insurance and
could take possession of my sweet (not so) little Mercedes.