Uninsured drivers costing us more each year

Trampas

Uninsured cost €67m last year
The Irish Times, David Labanyi, Wednesday October 18th

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The Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) paid out a record €67 million last year in compensation following crashes involving uninsured drivers.

This is a third higher than the average of roughly €50 million per annum paid out by the MIBI.

Bureau chief executive John Casey said that settling a number of long-standing "mega cases" of more than €1 million contributed to the record payout.

He said while the amount paid out last year was significantly higher, the number of domestic cases, at 2,298, was in line with recent years.

Another 953 cases involving a collision in Ireland with foreign registered vehicles were also settled. The final category is Irish registered involved with a crash in another EU country, many of which were lorries on French and German roads. There were 490 payouts in this category.

Mr Casey said the cost of meeting these claims was adding an extra €45 to the insurance premium for every driver every year.

Ireland continues to have one of the highest rates of uninsured driving in the EU, with almost 6 per cent, or 100,000 motorists having no insurance. In most countries the rate of uninsured driving is roughly 2 per cent.

Driving without insurance is a criminal offence and they also get two penalty points. More than 11,000 vehicles were seized by gardaí last year where the driver had no tax or insurance but there is no data available for the numbers prosecuted just for uninsured driving.

Every case that MIBI settles for compensation is handed over to Mason Hayes and Curran, a law firm specialising in debt recovery, to try and recoup some of the cost from the uninsured driver.


More penalty points should be give and fines should be 5 times what their premium should be instead of a couple of hundred.

People who have insurance has to pay this bill

Tipsy Mac

In the last year I have met about 5 Garda checkpoints in my area looking at tax and insurance where before I hadn't met one in 5 years of driving. The Gardai are doing the checks it's just the fines are far too low to have any impact, it should also be 12 points on the license straight away for no insurance. I really love Mac Tool, he brings in a law recently of a €10,000 fine for lighting a firework yet the maximum fine for driving around in 1 ton of steel with no insurance is a max of in or around €1500 :mad:

miju

agrre with you Tipsy mc, i'll admit when 18 i drove uninsured for a nearly a year (luckily didnt have an accident) but did get caught and got fined £1,200 punts.

now i'm NOT boasting here, but the cheapest insurance quote i could get at the time was £2,100 (no ban or edorsement) so at the time i saw it as saving myself a bundle (which I did)

of course now i'm fully insured karma came and bit me on the ass when i got hit by an uninsured / banned driver so i know what it's like on both sides of the coin

penalties really should be stiffer and should definitely be an automatic ban, lets face it there some VERY minor things you can get 2 points for that do not equate to the scale of driving uninsured and is basically another **** up by our government

J.R.HARTLEY

miju wrote:

penalties really should be stiffer and should definitely be an automatic ban,

they stick people in jail for not paying the TV licence, they should jail someone if they can't pay for the damages they have caused.

miju

J.R.HARTLEY wrote:

they stick people in jail for not paying the TV licence, they should jail someone if they can't pay for the damages they have caused.

to be honest , a lifetime or 5 year ban would do the trick and should apply to anyone caught without insurance involved in accident or not

Noelie

repo their car and sell it, proceeds going to the uninsured fund.

J.R.HARTLEY

miju wrote:

to be honest , a lifetime or 5 year ban would do the trick and should apply to anyone caught without insurance involved in accident or not

i don't think those punishments are sufficient, if they will drive without insurance they'll drive without licenses,
the amount of people i've seen with an L plate and no one else in the car, they aren't all on their 2nd license.

Chonker

I know a guy who borrowed his mates van (Untaxed, uninsured, no nct) crashed into a car with a family inside, near fairyhouse one sunday due to faulty brakes, was arrested by garda at scene and taken away....

Good enough I hear you say...

He released that day because his brother was a cop, and is now driving his own van as a delivery man (Own Business) on a prov licence so i assume no insurance again.

BTW he was ordered to pay 16,000 to the family which he has yet to do as he claims he has no job.

The moral of the story is you wont stop them untill you punish them properly or untill one of them kills a child.

I also know two Chinese men, doing the same. Planning to simply run away down the road if stopped.

Sizzler

What odds this lad had insurance :mad:

Todays Indo

A LATVIAN who was involved in an accident in which an elderly woman died told gardai the crash occurred when a car he was trying to overtake began to speed up.

Jevgenijs Aleksejevs (30), appeared in Dublin District Court yesterday charged with dangerous driving. Judge Hugh O'Donnell heard a more serious charge may be brought against him later. The DPP is currently considering that charge.

The dead woman was named last night as Elizabeth Gallagher, in her 80s, of Seapark, Malahide, Co Dublin.

Aleksejevs, a father of two with an address at Skerries Road in Lusk, Co Dublin, was arrested at 10.20am on Wednesday after a three-car collision at High Rock on the Coast Road in Malahide a short time earlier.

Garda Rosemary Gallagher of Malahide Garda Station told the court that she feared the defendant would flee the jurisdiction if given bail. She said he had a wife and two children in Latvia, and no real ties to Ireland.

Aleksejevs, who is a stonemason but currently out of work, arrived in Ireland 18 months ago.

The garda told the judge that in reply to the charge, he replied: "The car I was overtaking provoked me and didn't let me overtake him completely." She added that he was co-operative.

Speaking through an interpreter, Aleksejevs said that he would stay in the country if given bail.

Defence solicitor, Sean Holt, submitted his client's passport to the gardai and added that his client had a cousin and friends living in Ireland who were in court to support him. He said his client should not be remanded on the anticipation that more serious charges will be brought against him.

However, Judge O'Donnell remanded the defendant in custody to appear again at Cloverhill Court on January 11, and granted him legal aid.

"There were 300-plus people killed last year on the road," the judge said. "Another was killed on January 3. Your client admits he was on the wrong side of the road when the accident took place.

"He has no ties to the country, there is a large risk he will abscond."

The woman had been taken to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin after the crash on Wednesday morning, but she died later.

seamus

Sizzler wrote:

What odds this lad had insurance

Well in fairness there's nothing to suggest he didn't.

Sounds like a muppet though...

"The car I was overtaking provoked me and didn't let me overtake him completely."

Ah, that's OK so. He sped up, so you absolutely had to challenge him and get by. There's a procedure when someone does this; Abort the overtake.

bazz26

miju wrote:

to be honest , a lifetime or 5 year ban would do the trick and should apply to anyone caught without insurance involved in accident or not

The thing is though if people are quite happy to drive around without car insurance then they probably will not be too bothered either about driving around with a driver's licence with 12 points on it.

As someone else said you can go to jail for not paying your TV licence. So maybe sharing a cell with a guy called Buba for a few months might be more effective.

gyppo

bazz26 wrote:

The thing is though if people are quite happy to drive around without car insurance then they probably will not be too bothered either about driving around with a driver's licence with 12 points on it.

As someone else said you can go to jail for not paying your TV licence. So maybe sharing a cell with a guy called Buba for a few months might be more effective.

Dude, Buba wants some action - c'mon ovah heah..

seamus

bazz26 wrote:

The thing is though if people are quite happy to drive around without car insurance then they probably will not be too bothered either about driving around with a driver's licence with 12 points on it.

By the same token, a ban may not be much use either. A lifetime ban would only give them an "I have a nothing to lose" attitude.

Ideally someone would receive a minimum six months in prison and six months off the road after being released. Further breaches would carry stiffer minimum custodial sentences, in a fibbonaci-style sequence, i.e. 1st offence - 6 months, 2nd offence - 1 year, 3rd offence - 3 years, 4th offence - 12 years. Etc.

Of course, until we decide that judges can't override minimum statutory sentences (on the basis that they're "unfair" :rolleyes: ffs), then this too would be pointless.

Henry Ford III

miju wrote:

agrre with you Tipsy mc, i'll admit when 18 i drove uninsured for a nearly a year (luckily didnt have an accident) but did get caught and got fined £1,200 punts.

now i'm NOT boasting here, but the cheapest insurance quote i could get at the time was £2,100 (no ban or edorsement) so at the time i saw it as saving myself a bundle (which I did)

of course now i'm fully insured karma came and bit me on the ass when i got hit by an uninsured / banned driver so i know what it's like on both sides of the coin

penalties really should be stiffer and should definitely be an automatic ban, lets face it there some VERY minor things you can get 2 points for that do not equate to the scale of driving uninsured and is basically another **** up by our government

This is not good miju. When you finally paid for insurance did you tell the co. about your conviction?

Henry Ford III

The fine should be say 150% of the equivalent premium, and the uninsured car should be sold or scrapped.

That might be incentive enough.

Lpfsox

just a thought - the driver may be uninsured but the car has a valid disc on it; that would never be stopped at a checkpoint. A former boyfriend was crashed into by a muppet who didn't bother slowing down for a red light and who was driving his girlfriend's car and was not insured to be.

She put him onto her policy but the insurers wouldn't let her backdate it to before he'd had the crash.

He offered to pay for the damage but when he got the bill (it was a brand new car, so we went to a main dealer for repairs) he refused to pay it and suggested his mate fix the damage instead.

Anyway, the gardai called to his house where he openly admitted causing the crash and challenged them to do something about it. They never did.

It would have cost thousands to go through the courts and our solicitor said that we had a good chance of winning the case but realistically we'd never see a penny off the guy so we claimed through the motor insurance bureau.

WizZard

Lpfsox wrote:

Anyway, the gardai called to his house where he openly admitted causing the crash and challenged them to do something about it. They never did.

Seriously?

Seth Brundle

Sizzler wrote:

Speaking through an interpreter, Aleksejevs said that he would stay in the country if given bail.

Hmm, is it common for absconders to admit their intentions up front? :rolleyes:

mike65

The country being Latvia.

Mike.