The number of Polish-registered cars here is a reflection of how expensive our insurance is, says Conor Pope after meeting some of their drivers.
The eastern European registered cars competing for space outside the Polish language Sunday masses in St Michan's Church in Dublin's north inner city are not flash.
There are no BMWs, Mercedes or convertibles, just ordinary cars driven extraordinary distances across the continent to save owners the combined cost of getting here, buying a new car and, for a short time at any rate, the cost of paying eye-watering Irish insurance premiums.
Sebastian is sitting in his metallic blue 1996 Opel Vectra waiting for mass to end and his girlfriend to emerge from the churchly gloom. The discrete PL on the licence plate gives him away. He has been driving his car in Ireland for over three months. It arrived shortly after he did, courtesy of a relay team made up of his parents and a friend.
It was bought in Poland for €2,500 and his parents drove it as far as Hamburg where a friend took over to complete the long final stretch into Ireland. Covering about 600 miles daily, the trip lasted three days. Sebastian flew here for about €100.
It was a lot of effort - at least for other people - but so far has proved worthwhile. The car has allowed him keep in touch with friends in Dublin - he lives 50 kilometres from the city - at a cost he can afford. There is no way, he says, he could have afforded to drive in Ireland had he not brought his car from home.
"The problem for me is the insurance. My car is insured in Poland and the comprehensive policy costs €125 a year."
There wouldn't be much change from €2,000 for a similar policy for a 28-year-old man with a fairly short and not entirely blemish-free driving history in Ireland.
By driving his Polish registered and insured car Sebastian is not breaking the law. At least not yet.
As a temporary visitor he isn't obliged to have the car re-registered for the first year he lives here. If he decides to stay for longer than 12 months the Revenue can, in certain circumstances, extend it to two years - then the car will have to have an Irish registration number and his low-cost insurance will become a happy memory.
Having secured a job in the IT sector, he thinks he will stay for at least five years.
"I don't have to pay the tax now but in two months I will go to the tax office and they will tell me what I have to do." It will come as some relief to him to learn that as he has owned the car for more than six months before arriving here, it is exempt from VRT.
"We don't have VRT in Poland. We pay for it in fuel costs, however. A litre of petrol costs €1.25 at home now and the wages are a lot less than here."
It is virtually impossible to establish how many people like Sebastian are driving in the State. The Revenue Office says statistics on the individual countries of origin of imported cars are not kept.
"We don't have a breakdown by country now. That is something we are working on at the moment," a spokesman says.
The Garda, for its part, says there is no way to accurately establish the number of cars arriving here from eastern Europe.
According to the Garda Press office there are no "statistics available on how many fatal collisions involve vehicles with left hand drives."
Despite this absence of any evidence there are increasingly vocal suggestions from a growing number of sources that vehicles imported by non-nationals are a "major problem" which has led to "daily complaints."
Last month the chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Transport, John Ellis, said there were "daily complaints" of immigrants' vehicles not being properly taxed or insured or subject to National Car Test regulations.
"It is a favourite trick of these people when confronted by the guards that they have no English," he remarked.
In response the Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy accepted that there was a loophole in the law which meant the Garda does not have powers to impound untaxed or uninsured foreign-registered cars driven by non-residents of the State.
He said there was a "major problem in the area."
When The Irish Times contacted Mr Ellis to ask where he had got the information he said he was basing his comments on "experience up and down the country. There is no accurate figures for this but if you look at the numbers you see on the roads it is very high," he says.
He estimates that approximately 10 per cent of non-nationals from continental Europe - upwards of 20,000 - have their cars registered in their home country.
He believes that some drivers are driving cars that would not pass the NCT here and are avoiding the 12-month rule.
"It is easy to take the car out of the country after 12 months, go home for a week and then bring it back," he says.
Regulations should be changed immediately so that "any car that is imported for a period of more than a month should have to get clearance," he says.
Outside St Michan's, Sebastian, leaning on his well-maintained car, is talking about the Polish second-hand car market which is kept buoyed by cars sold into it from the German market.
"Poles buy a lot of second-hand cars from Germany. The second-hand cars there are very good."
If the Polish car market is kept motoring by the presence of German cars, the Irish second-hand market is performing well thanks to the presence of non-nationals opting for cheaper cars.
"At the lower end of the used car market, there is now increased demand," one industry source has told The Irish Times.
"There is now more of an interest in cars which are seven or eight years old than might have been the case before and that is down to the numbers of non-nationals working here."
Following the high number of fatalities among non-nationals on the State's roads since the beginning of the year - nine of the 39 fatalities in January came from Eastern Europe - questions are being asked about the safety implications of the influx of left-hand drive vehicles into the State.
"It's no problem driving on the left with the steering wheel on the left too, you get used to it," Sebastian says.
"It might be a bit of problem when I go to overtake," he concedes.
"I think that the Irish people drive much worse than the Polish people. You see a lot of Irish people who drive after drinking. That is not something you see with Polish people."
He says he is a careful driver who has never attracted garda attention.
Jan Kaminski is something of a pioneer when it comes to bringing a car for personal use from the east.
A leading member of the Irish-Polish society and resident here for more than 40 years, he graduated from Trinity College in 1962.
Soon afterwards he had his first car, a not-too-shabby seven series BMW, confiscated by the Special Branch.
He bought it at a knock-down price in Munich where a friend worked in a dealership and drove it back to Dublin where it almost immediately attracted the attention of the gardai - it didn't help that he used to routinely park it across the road from a station.
After they discovered its origins it was impounded and when it was returned Kaminski had no choice, because of its dubious legal status in the Republic, but to leave it parked across the border in the North before eventually driving it back to Germany.
Now, nearly 50 years on, that is one road apparently, a lot less travelled.
Kaminski expresses his surprise that politicians such as Ellis are making negative statements about non-national drivers.
"I don't think such comments are based on experience or research. People should find out if it is fact or fiction. Statistics should be available and they aren't.
"If they were it might surprise some people. Politicians tend to play games for political reasons. The subject still remains open," he says.