We will actually lose something when we get rid of our motor tax discs

IF YOU EVER find yourself seated next to a velologist at a dinner party, settle in.

Velology is the study and collection of tax discs, and yes, it is a real word, with a real community behind it, an active Facebook group swapping scans of rare finds, and a proper publication, The Velologist, running for decades.

A rare 1921 disc, from the very first year of issue, holds the collectors’ record at over £1,300. Someone out there has spent more on a scrap of expired paper than most people spend taxing an actual car for a year, and they will happily tell you why, at length, given the chance. 

Velologists are about to have a bittersweet couple of years, because the object of their affection is being phased out.

There’s a particular kind of Irish windscreen archaeology that anyone over 40 will recognise, whether they know the word velology or not. Peel back the current tax disc in its little plastic holder, and there’s a decent chance you’ll find one, two, sometimes three expired predecessors stacked up behind it like sedimentary rock.

Nobody meant to create a tiny paper time capsule of their motoring history. It happened by accident, through pure inertia. The plastic holders went brittle and sun-baked over time, peeling the old disc out cleanly became a genuine hassle, and sliding the new one in front was simply easier than doing it properly.

Multiply that laziness by a decade of renewals and you had, without ever intending to, a little archive of your own driving life curling up behind the glass.

That object, mundane, slightly absurd, quietly beloved, is now living out its final years on Irish roads.

I’ll admit to a small pang of recognition writing that first paragraph. I’ve had more than a few cars over the years, and I can picture the windscreen of each one, discs stacked up like tree rings marking how long I’d owned it.

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There’s something oddly satisfying about picking one off cleanly and seeing the ghost of the year before showing through, a little private record of ownership that nobody else was ever meant to notice. It’s a small thing to feel nostalgic about, and yet here we are.

A century on the windscreen

The tax disc arrived in Ireland in 1921, introduced alongside motor tax itself, when duty was calculated by horsepower. It was never really “the tax” in any meaningful sense. It was the receipt, the small circular proof that you’d paid, visible to any garda or nosy neighbour who cared to look.

For over a hundred years, that was the entire point of it: not enforcement, but visibility. Anyone could tell, at a glance, whether the car next to them was legitimate.

That’s the piece now disappearing.

I put a call in to Minister for Transport Darragh O’Brien this week, and he told me directly that scrapping the paper disc will save the State €8 million, with a hybrid system running through 2027 before the disc vanishes for good in 2028.

Insurance and NCT discs are expected to follow the same path eventually, though no date has been set for either.

The mechanism replacing it is straightforward enough. Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras already give gardaí instant digital access to a vehicle’s tax status. The paper disc, from a pure enforcement standpoint, has been redundant for years. This is less a reform than a formality catching up with technology that’s already doing the job. 

The money underneath the story

2025 was a record year for what the State takes in from motorists. Combined VRT and motor tax revenue is now running at close to €1.9 billion annually, €933m from VRT, €927m from motor tax, sitting inside a record €5.9 billion in environmental taxes overall.

Meanwhile, the Comptroller and Auditor General’s most recent figures show the number of vehicles on Irish roads grew by roughly 20% between 2016 and 2024, while motor tax revenue itself actually fell by around 12% over the same period, because newer cars sit in cleaner CO2 bands and simply pay less.

Put those two facts side by side and something interesting emerges. The State is happy to give up €8m in administrative savings in the very year it’s hauling in a record transport tax take, which tells you the disc was never really about the money. €8m is a rounding error against €1.9 billion. The real question isn’t why now, it’s what we lose when it goes.

What we’re actually trading away

For a century, motor tax compliance was partly a citizen’s job. Anyone could look at a windscreen and know. What replaces it is entirely institutional, a database, a camera network, a system the ordinary driver has no visibility into at all. That’s not necessarily a bad trade. It’s almost certainly more efficient, harder to dodge, and less prone to the kind of low-level corner cutting that a visible paper disc never actually stopped anyway.

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But it is a trade, and it’s worth naming it as one rather than waving it through as pure administrative tidying. We’re moving from a system where compliance was visible to everyone, to one where it’s visible only to the State.

Ireland won’t be the first to make this move. The UK scrapped its own paper tax disc back in 2014, replacing it entirely with ANPR enforcement and no physical alternative at all, not even a sticker.

There was a similar wave of nostalgia at the time, and a similar bump in interest from British collectors keen to get their hands on a final run of discs before they became historical artefacts rather than everyday ones. Ireland’s hybrid approach, running the old and new systems in parallel until next year, is a more gradual version of the same road, giving drivers a year to get used to not having anything to peel off the windscreen at all.

There’s a small practical knock on effect too, one that will land close to home for anyone shopping for a car this year. That glance through the windscreen was always part of viewing a secondhand car, checking the disc matched the reg, working out the tax band before you’d even opened the door.

That casual check is going the same way as the disc itself.

If you’re buying a car, DoneDeal Cars carries its own motor tax guide, walking through how the CO2 based systems work depending on when a car was first registered, and how to check tax status properly online rather than trusting a disc that might already be out of date. Old habits die hard, but some deserve to. 

Spare a thought, too, for the velologists. Their collections just became a little more finite, and a little more precious.

Paddy Comyn is the head of automotive content and communications with DoneDeal Cars. He has been involved in the Irish motor industry for more than 25 years. 

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