EMISSIONS:Want a car? The bank won't give you money? Then it's time to talk to an emigrant, writes Killian Doyle
AS YOU are no doubt aware, Ireland’s second-hand car market has sunk without trace – partly because nobody has any money and partly because carpetbaggers like me are heading up North or over the Irish Sea to buy theirs.
(Yes, I have bought another car. Predictably enough, it’s a BMW estate. Lush it is too. I’ve named it The Millstone in honour of the debt I’m now lumbered with. My old BMW estate has been deposed from his exalted spot in the driveway and now sits on the road outside my house, much to his and my neighbours’ annoyance. There it will stay until I can find someone kind enough to buy it; I fear it may be there for some time.)
Anyway, there may be a silver lining to this car-shaped cloud. Say you don’t have a car and you want one. The bank won’t give you any money and sellers are refusing to stare reality in the face and drop their prices. But all is not lost.
Go to any airport in Ireland and single out the emigrants. It’s easy to differentiate them from the holidaymakers – they are the ones smiling broadly because they know they don’t have to come back again.
Many are Irish folk scurrying like rats off the sinking LE Éire, while others are former immigrants who’ve realised a life on the dole in grim, grey Longford is a far less attractive proposition than a life on the dole in sunny Moldova.
Ask them what they’ve done with their car. Some may not have owned one and will ignore you. Others will proudly boast that they’ve been lucky enough to offload theirs before leaving.
But there will be some who gave up trying to shift theirs for a half-decent price and left it in the airport car park to rust away instead.
The money they’d have got for it was less than the price of a taxi to the airport. And anyway, how many people are going to export the right-hand-drive 14-year-old Honda Civic back to Lithuania?
Offer them €50 for their keys and registration document. It’s a no-brainer for them. They have €50 and you have a car. Bravo. It may be a rustbucket, but it’ll do.
Speaking of parking, I see Tewkesbury council has rejected a proposal by the Gloucestershire town’s mayor to introduce free parking for Christians attending church on Sunday mornings.
Councillors recoiled in horror at the suggestion, saying that this “pray and display” system would be seen to be discriminating against other faiths, even though there are seven churches in the town and no mosques, synagogues or other places of worship other than the shopping mall.
One obvious question arises here. If such a system were introduced, how would the parking wardens tell which cars were owned by Christians and which were owned by heathens? Throw them in a lake and see if they float?
It’s at times like these that Christians are wont to ask: What would Jesus do? That’s simple: He’d just park his massive SUV – he was a carpenter after all – bang on the steps of the church and stroll right in. Who among the flock is going to tell Jesus off? It’s like that old joke about the guy who gets a pet gorilla. When asked by a pal where Kong sleeps, our friend replies: “Anywhere he wants.”
While on the subject of Christian drivers, I am reminded of a nurse friend of mine who used to work in AE. She tells me that if she had a euro for every time an unfortunate car crash victim was rushed in with a St Christopher’s medal embedded in their forehead, she’d be minted. Alright, so maybe not enough for a new Bentley, but she’d at least have enough to pay for a Sunday morning’s parking in Tewkesbury.
There’s a lesson in that somewhere.