Tere!
In 2021, I planned to go to Northern Ireland and Sweden in March, 2022. Although I have been to Northern Ireland before, I spent only a short time in Enniskillen that is just beyond the border of the Republic. Therefore, I wanted to go to the eastern coastal area, Giants Causeway, etc on the trip in 2022. (The purpose of going to Sweden was to go to a gig by Louis Tomlison from One Direction, by the way.)
At that time (in 2021), I also planned to go to a concert in Oslo, Norway by Harry Styles from One Direction too. However, the tour in Europe had been postponed without any certainty due to COVID. Thereinto, he cancelled all the concerts in the tour in the end, and yet extended the tour itself, so I had to buy a new ticket for a new date. Then, I found one day in Dublin in June! In addition to it, I wanted to visit Northern Ireland, see my friends in Dublin, and to try to travel with my boyfriend, so that was a great timing, and I decided to go there. I suggested to him to travel together with my solo plan to go to the concert, and he agreed “I want to drive a car in Ireland (because in Ireland it’s left-hand traffic opposed to the right-hand traffic in Estonia)”.
Well, eventually we didn’t go north but went west, but as planned we rented a car anyway, so here I’m going to talk about a car rental in Ireland.
Table of Contents
1. In Ireland: manual transmission vs. automatic transmission?
2. Car rental vs. car sharing
3. How many days and where to rent a car?
4. What is “Pay and Display” in Ireland?
5. Petrol price display in Ireland
★Summary
1. In Ireland: manual transmission vs. automatic transmission?
First of all, you may be curious which transmission type is more common in Ireland: manual or automatic. In Ireland, the manual transmission is more common. It seems few people use cars with the automatic transmission.
On the other hand, according to a staff member in one driving school in Estonia, it’s fifty-fifty. There are of course the manual transmission-cars, but personally it seems more cars with automatic transmission are sold in Estonia. Unlike Japan, in Estonia it costs the same in a driving school for both driving licence for the automatic transmission and the manual transmission. In regards to the hand traffic, similarly to other Continental countries, it’s the right-hand traffic (the American way) in Estonia.
Therefore, my boyfriend constantly said “I need a car with automatic transmission if I drive in Ireland” (because he had to change the speed with the opposite hand). So we were looking for a car with the automatic transmission when I suggested to him to book a car, but in April 2022, the prices for cars with the automatic transmission got twice as expensive as before. (It seemed to cost around 500 EUR at the end of March given that we rented a car with the automatic transmission for one week, but after that the price increased to 1000 EUR with the same conditions and period.)
We both were just saying “this is too expensive”.
2. Car rental vs. car sharing
Later on, one Estonian that I knew suggested to me “Perhaps it’s cheaper if you choose something like Bolt Drive or Citybee (car sharing)”, hence I googled, and found a car sharing service in Ireland called GoCar. I shared this information with him.
A few days after that, I happened to check GoCar’s FAQ, and found a sentence like “We are trying to verify you within 48 hours”, so I shared this information with my boyfriend one week before leaving for ireland. However, he really didn’t like planning (and was not very good at planning either), so it seemed he didn’t do anything… (Also, his mental condition wasn’t great at that time.)
Eventually we decided to rent a car, and didn’t choose car sharing, but at the end of this trip we concluded that renting a car was actually cheaper, maybe if the travelling type was like ours. If you have a specific destination, and no plan to drop by anywhere, I guess you may choose car sharing.
3. How many days and where to rent a car?
I have also heard that if you rent a car on site, it could be cheaper than booking one beforehand, but from the perspective as a Japanese person, you can never do this, especially in Japan…. Basically you need to book everything in Japan, and otherwise you will be necessity-less…
The following morning after arriving in Ireland, I searched for a car on a comparison website like Skyscanner or Google flights as a car rental version called Carhire.ie. (In other words, on Skyscanner, you can see flight schedules and airlines or travel agencies that offer, but on Carhire.ie you can see some car options and which car rental company offers those options.)
I have a Japanese driving license, and it does allow me to drive a car with the manual transmission, but I had never driven a car since I got the license, and moreover, due to the Geneva convention, I was not able to apply for an international driving license as I lived in Estonia more than one year, for whom it required to get a driving license in Estonia by going to the driving school and taking exams like a local person. Plus, I had no idea or knowledge about cars, so I completely asked him to select a car. (He loves cars and driving, and he does watch some YouTube channels about cars, so he has a lot of knowledge.)
Then, we decided to rent a car from the 23rd of June until the 27th of June, 2022.
Why did we select this time period? I was searching on Carhire.ie, looking at his searching filters, so I just put the same period as he did, and it seemed he just kept that filtering, and booked a car.
Well, please check the filtering before deciding.
😂
On Carhire.ie we chose a car rental company called Europcar, and rented at the office in Spencer Dock in Dublin. (The place to return the car for us was the same as well.)
When going to Northern Ireland (since it is the UK), probably the rules are different, and in such a case you need to check further.
When booking a car, it cost around 500 EUR, but at the Europcar office in Spencer Dock, he customised a lot (a car with diesel, a screen that shows the back side of the car, Bluetooth connection, etc), so around 400 EUR was added, and the total sum was approximately 900 EUR.
Also, he eventually decided to drive a car with the manual transmission. (Well it made sense as cars with the automatic transmission were too expensive.)This is why the initial payment was around 500 EUR.
By the way, according to my Japanese friend’s husband in Dublin, the reason why the cars with the automatic transmission were so expensive was probably because they reduced the number of cars with the automatic transmission due to less demand affected by COVID, so at that time, there were fewer cars with automatic transmission available in Ireland.
4. What is “Pay and Display” in Ireland?
Our flights for this trip were to and from Dublin, so our car rental started from Dublin too, but it seemed very difficult and stressful to drive a car in Dublin. I was just sitting next to my boyfriend, but I felt it.
When we rented a card, we did in the morning so we hadn’t eaten anything yet. Hence we agreed to have something somewhere a bit outside of the city centre, and we were looking for a car park, but
no car park was shown in Google maps!
We randomly went to some street, and temporarily stopped a car there as we could see “P”, and noticed there was a description “Pay and display”. When I searched, it seemed to be a system with which you can pay for parking via its app, by call, or at the ticket machine in that parking area. In our case, the app was not downloadable (in Estonian app stores on both Google Play and iOS), and calling didn’t work, so I had to look for an actual ticket machine. Then I found one.
There the ticket machine accepted the exact amount of coins. In Dublin, unless you have a Leap card, you need to pay in cash when getting on a Dublin bus, and since I knew they didn’t give any change, I had and bought a bunch of coins separately. Therefore, we were able to pay the exact amount of the ticket.
In this system, you need to pay for parking first, and you need to put the ticket in the front glass until you get back there. (The detailed explanation can be found at the ticket machine.)
In Ireland many places had this system, so I got used to it while travelling. In the countryside, some were free on Sundays.
However, the problem is that it is not shown in the map, so it’s hard to find one.
5. Petrol price display in Ireland
My boyfriend drives a diesel car in daily life in Estonia, so I often checked the price for diesel from the Tallinn bus in the days when the petrol prices were rising. In Estonia, the price is shown like “1.99” per litre. This means one litre of petrol costs “1 euro, 99 cents”.
On the other hand, in Ireland for some reason the price was shown in cents, the display was like “219” per litre.
In my opinion, if we want to calculate on our own, the Estonian way of display is better.
This section is just for your information. It does not mean “219 EUR” per litre.
★Summary
I really appreciate my boyfriend who drove a car for such a long long time in Ireland, and yet while travelling by car I wished I would have been able to drive a car, many times. Because if I had been able to, I would have been able to take turns with thim. (After that I seriously planned to go to a driving school in Estonia.)
One way took three hours at maximum, so even though he loved driving, it was physically exhausting to drive in a different land and in a different system, I believe.
Also, what I can say for sure is that a car is convenient. (I know it’s taken for granted.) You know we often want to go to places we want to go to while travelling. I reckoned that with a car I could use my time more freely, and visit any paces I wanted to almost without any compromise. However, next time when travelling by car, I definitely want to book one in advance. Even if it would be a solo trip.
Aitäh! 🙂
zooks.ee 