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Renting a car in Ireland - Age? Insurance?

• Hey everyone! My friend and I are possibly planning a trip to Ireland at the beginning of September. One of the ideas we're tossing around is to fly into Shannon, and have a car rented for approximately 2 to 2 and a half weeks. We don't like the idea of being "stuck" in one spot (ie. hotels, cottages, hostels, etc.), and we also don't like the idea of big "tourist-traps" (ie. Dublin) or guided tours -- we want to do this on our own! Once we get over the whole driving on the other side of the road (we're from Canada) -- we do have a couple of other questions that hopefully you smart people of Y!A will be able to assist us with to give us an overview of what to expect: - Age requirments for renting a car? (By September, we will both be 24) - What insurance would we need? (Right now, we both hold "Secondary driver" insurance on our parent's vehicles. Would we have to bump this up to full insurance/primary driver for the sake of our trip?) - Would GPS be recommended -- or are the locals as friendly as we've heard to assist us when we get lost -- which we plan on. LoL - Any other notes you can put forth about renting a car would be helpful! Thanks! :)

• Answer:

  You need an international licence. I would strongly advise contacting a car hire company to ask about insurance and other costs. Yes, do get a GPS. Locals are friendly, but many of them have very strong accents which can be hard to understand, and there are a fair few non-Irish living here now that might not speak English so well yet. If you can't drive a stick shirt car, you find it very hard to find an automatic car, we don't really do them in Ireland. And you will need to factor in the cost of fuel for the car - currently petrol is €1.30 on average per litre, diesel is a little less, there are about 3.5 litres to the gallon, do the maths. Fuelling your car could cost as much as the actual car hire, just be aware of this cost. And one more thing - you might think you could travel across Ireland in an hour. No. You can't. Irish roads are not made for large volumes of high-speed traffic, it is not physically possible to drive 100 miles in 100 minutes, so don't try to 'do' Dublin in the morning and Cork in the afternoon. Even though it's a good road between the two cities, you should allow 3 to 4 hours to drive it, not just because it's fast but because you are likely to want to stop off at at least two places (like Cashel and Cahir) along the way. Pick a region and stay there for a few days, make your day trips from your accommodation. And have a nice time.