『My Irish driving licence exam』のカバーアート

My Irish driving licence exam

My Irish driving licence exam

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 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 ...
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