It's a flat rectangle of plastic, a little over 30cm long and 10cm deep. You can pick one up from any motor parts supplier in the country and they cost next to nothing. They're regulated by both the Government and the EU, so you can't (or at least you're not supposed to) go modifying them for aesthetic purposes. Yet, at this time of year, they achieve such boundless importance that we are prepared to prostrate ourselves on an altar of depreciation and deposits just so that, for about five minutes, we can say that we had the newest one.
I speak, of course, of number plates.
Number plates used not to matter so much. Remember the good old days when we all had ones beginning with FZV and only the truly, unbearably anorak-y types could actually tell you what any of it meant? When interpreting a number plate required a parka, a bobble hat, a note book and some questionable personal hygiene habits.
That all changed in the glorious eighties (all hail Haughey!!!) when the likes of 88 D 3124 was everywhere (the actual registration number of the Ford Sierra I passed my test in...) and for a while Ireland had the most logical number plate system in Europe. When the year changed, so did the plate, you could tell which county every car that passed you was from (without inspecting the back window for a 'Lovely Laois' or 'Limerick, You're A Lady' sticker) and the simple sequential number was pure rationality. For a country only just beginning to emerge from the quagmire of its torturous, put-upon agrarian history, it was quite the minimalist move. Certainly more sensible than the ridiculous 'which August did D-reg plates start in?' confusion of our UK cousins.
And then it all got a bit... messy. You see, that rational, simple number plate system would have worked fine in a rational, simple country. Switzerland would have loved it, and all those careful, car buying Swiss would have painstakingly worked out their budgets and only darkened the door of a car dealer when they were certain that (a) they needed a new car and (b) they were going to get a good deal for it.
Us though? Sweet Jebus, us... You just can't give an Irish man or woman a chance for one-upmanship. That sense of being the first with the new thing, having the shiniest and most box-fresh. Even if it's only the most fleeting of feelings, we want it, crave it and are desperate to get our grasping hands upon it. As Ireland finally developed an actual economy (as opposed to a series of crises) suddenly, more and more of us had the cash to indulge that yearning. To be the first with the new plate. We became a nation of Ross O'Carroll-Kellys.
And we nearly broke the system. So keen were we all to scramble for that new plate in January that the Irish motor industry basically only worked from January to March. After that point, the newness, the novelty of the new plate had worn off and car dealers spent the rest of the year twiddling their or someone else's thumbs and working out how to keep the overheads paid. So disastrous was it that it finally took the creeping realisation that we were all going to have a number 13 on our number plates (we still do - there's just a 1 next to it is all...) to create a shift in the system. So now we have a two-plate year, and there is now a small sales spike in July with the changeover, which has evened things out a little. Only a little though - the bulk of Irish sales still take part in the first couple of months of every year.
And I'm going to plead with you to stop. Not to stop buying cars, but to stop being obsessed with the new plate. It's ridiculous - our entire motor industry is built around three tiny pieces of printed numbers, baked onto a plastic tray. We run, lemming-like, to the car dealer in January, forgetting that everyone else is doing the same, so there's less and less chance of us getting the deal we want, and in some cases the car we want.
Now, that's where it gets monumentally silly. You're spending all that money, investing in something you're going to be driving for at least three years and at the last second get palmed off by the salesman into something you didn't quite want, just because he's short of stock? Come on people, wake up...
Ignore the plate. Forget what the neighbours will think (do you even actually know your neighbours?) and put perception behind you. Cars are something with which to fall in love. They're not just appliances to buy when needed, they're there to stir our passions and our desires, so much more so than the sum of their metal, plastic and rubber parts would suggest. So don't buy just because the plate is new. Buy because you desperately want this thing. This Audi. This Honda. This Toyota. This Volvo. This whatever. You do know that, probably within our lifetimes, this is all going to be outlawed, right? Legislators will finally see sense and realise that allowing partially-trained shaved monkeys control of two-tonne projectiles moving at two kilometres a minute is just stupid and we'll all be white-papered into using 40km/h robot-controlled Google drones.
Do you really want your last car purchase to be all about the number plate?