In the month before our departure from the United States to take up new jobs in Ireland in 2009, my wife and I sold our cars. We had been living in Arizona, the last territory to become a state in the contiguous 48 states, where all the roads were laid out in a grid, distances between point A and point B always seemed vast, and surviving without a car is inconceivable. Now we were moving to a country smaller than the three largest Arizona counties where one drives on the left from a steering wheel on the right while shifting with the left hand. We brought our bicycles instead of the cars.
Still, for many Americans, it’s hard to imagine life without a car. What if we decided to buy one? As it turned out, not having a car wasn’t the first concern. We soon learned that the U.S. was not a “Recognised State” in the eyes of the Irish National Driver Licence Service (NDLS) and we therefore could not simply exchange our Arizona driving licences for Irish ones. The law gave us permission to drive with our U.S. licences for just a year, so our first concern would be getting an Irish driving licence.
It turned out that the timeframe was even narrower. We’d first have to pass a preliminary driving theory test in order to obtain a learner’s permit. Then, we’d have to sign up with a driving school for twelve hours of road experience—called Essential Driver Training (EDT). But … it was required that six months pass from the date the learner’s permit was issued before one could take the actual exam to receive a licence. In other words, if we wanted to drive legally in Ireland, we had to start our lessons within six months of arrival. That didn’t happen.
Both my wife and I eventually signed up for the learner’s permit. She registered for driving lessons, completed the on-road instruction, and passed the driving test on the first try, six months after getting the learner’s permit—which we came to understand is quite a feat. I dilly-dallied, as my mother might have said, and put it off for a few years. There was an element of indignity to the situation, from my perspective: after all, I’d learned to drive on dirt roads in rural farmland before I reached my teens. Then I’d taken driving lessons at age 16 (there’s another story to be told about falling asleep at the wheel during driver training in Connecticut) and had been driving ever since.
So my wife became a legal driver while I resisted. This of course became an issue when we would occasionally hire a car to explore other parts of the island. I still had my Arizona driver’s licence stamped with a credible expiration date, but we’d lived in Ireland longer than a year; moreover, since we were no longer Arizona residents, that state also would not have considered my licence to be valid. This being Ireland, however, I was not about to simply shrug and accept things as they appeared on the surface.
I paid a visit to the local Garda (police) station and had a friendly chat with a couple Gardaí who happened to be standing around. I let them know I’d been living in Ireland for a certain length of time, and I wondered what would happen if I were stopped while driving a rental car and it became clear that I was not driving legally (according to the letter of the law). In some other jurisdiction the answer would have been obvious. But one of the officers cocked his head and asked, “Is the agency where you hire the car willing to provide insurance?” When I answered affirmatively, he said, “Ah, that’s the only thing we care about.”
For me, that was as good as having my licence renewed. My wife, however, held me to a higher standard than An Garda Síochána (the Guardians of the Peace), and after a few years I renewed my learner’s permit and started driving lessons.
My instructor was a friendly retired fellow from the neighbouring village of Dalkey. He was a man with a calm demeanour and nerves of steel who enjoyed a good chat while we were out on the road driving around. I learned that his usual transportation was a big old motorcycle he’d had for years, one that could reliably be seen parked in front of one of the less touristic pubs in his village. We talked about motorcycles and fast cars, and occasionally he rendered tips about driving. As with all learning processes in Ireland, the lessons were not about learning to drive; they were about learning to pass the driving test, which has several predictable elements, and we’d take time out during each excursion to practice them. Driving instructors knew all the routes a licence inspector would take during the exams, so we frequently travelled them as a kind of rehearsal.
A couple components of the test were things I’d prepared for decades prior for my Connecticut driving test: the so-called Y-turn (or K-turn in Connecticut parlance) and backing-up into a parking space. (Oddly, parallel parking was not part of the standard driving test.) There was also a manoeuvre I felt was a bit odd: backing up around a corner (they test for this in the UK, too). We’d find a quiet neighbourhood with intersecting streets, stop, then I’d be instructed to reverse the car around the corner, using only the rearview mirrors to guide the process. The goal was to remain as close to the curb as possible throughout. When I commented that I could not imagine trying this “in the real world,” since it struck me as inherently dangerous, he explained that the point was to demonstrate driving skill—it was not to prepare me for actually doing this anywhere, at any time.
Otherwise most of the counsel the instructor offered consisted of statements like “Keep checking your mirrors. If you’re not seen to be always checking the mirrors they’ll take points off and you’ll fail the test.” I began to think that I was checking the mirrors so often I was more aware of what lay behind us than what lay ahead.
The day of the driving test finally arrived. My wife and I still had no car so I had to pay the driving instructor to accompany me. I entered the test centre, took the written exam, then joined the driving inspector for the road test: me behind the wheel, he next to me, tablet in hand, silently touching its screen at frequent points during the test.
It happened to be a morning following an exceptionally windy night. The inspector guided me along the twisty roads of a residential neighbourhood. The roads, however, were littered with branches that the wind had brought down the night before; at one point a rubbish bin rested on its side in the middle of the road. I’d not prepared for an obstacle course. Nevertheless, to my mind, I’d aced the exam: I was not aware of a single flaw in my performance.
We returned to the test centre and I followed the inspector to his office, where he sat and fiddled with paperwork for several minutes. Eventually he spoke: “Well, John, you passed the written exam but you failed the road exam.” He explained with a neutral demeanour all the errors I had committed while driving—not having stayed close enough to the curb taking a left turn, not having sufficiently checked my rear view mirrors (!), etc. Apparently backing up around the corner had not been a problem.
It would be another 90 days before I could try again. Meanwhile I shared my failure with colleagues at work, and I began to hear many similar tales. One colleague, who still did not have a licence, had failed more than ten times! Others admitted, almost with a bit of pride, that they had failed too, some also more than once. And the various test centres around Dublin each had their own reputation for leniency or lack thereof. The one where I was tested was considered to be among the most lenient. But everyone considered the driving exam to be rigorous—an Irish rite of passage.
On the day I took my exam for the second time it was raining, but the roads were clear and we traversed exactly the same roads I’d driven before with the inspector and the driving teacher. All the while, as I ostentatiously checked the mirrors, I thought, “I’m nailing it,” but that’s what I thought the first time, too. The inspector told me what to do, I did it, and he kept tapping his tablet without comment.
Back in the office, he again silently completed his paperwork, finally looking up and peering directly into my eyes. It was to be the most Irish moment of my new life in auld Éire. His expression unchanged, he said flatly, “Well, John, you came within one point of failing again !”
Ah, no “congratulations,” no “you passed this time.” Just “You almost failed” and a cold listing of the (to me) imperceptible mistakes I had made out on those suburban roads: I still wasn’t checking the mirrors to his satisfaction.
Documents in hand attesting to my status as a bona fide Irish driver, I returned to the car and gave my instructor the good news. He invited me to drive home, thereby giving me something of a victory lap to celebrate with. As we drove off I told him about the inspector’s seeming disappointment that I had passed the exam, noting that I’d come “within one point of failing.” He just smiled, look at me and said, “John, it wasn’t ever about learning to drive, you’d had your licence for years. It’s really just a ritual to help you understand this little country of ours.” And, you know, I think he was right.
