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Gardaí detect around 128 drivers travelling without insurance every day on Irish roads.
Over the past five years, gardaí have seized 95,000 vehicles under Section 41 of the Road Traffic Act for the offence.
Since 2017, €15.3m in fines have been dished out for driving without insurance according to statistics released by the Department of Justice.
There were 8,408 people convicted last year for the offence, up from 6,283 in 2020. Since 2017, a total of 45,406 people have been convicted.
In each of the years from 2017 to 2019, over 9,000 fines were issued for this offence.
This fell to 5,513 in 2020 during the first year of the pandemic before rising again to 7,547 in 2021.
Each year, the fines accumulated by motorists for not having insurance runs into the millions.
The total value of fines imposed last year was €2.8m, and €1.9m in 2020.
A key tool used by gardaí to detect these vehicles is the automatic number-plate recognition system. The technology used by gardaí can read number plates at a rate of six per second on vehicles travelling up to 180km/h.
Releasing the figures via parliamentary question, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said: “I am informed by the Garda authorities that Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) was first introduced by the Garda authorities in 2008 and is used on a daily basis to assist in the prevention and detection of crime on our roads network.
The minister said she has been told that since the system went live an average of 128 uninsured vehicles have been identified by gardaí per day through the use of ANPR, approximately five per hour over a 24-four hour period.
The most uninsured drivers are detected on Fridays, with an average of 143. The rates are lower at the weekend with just 100 detected on average on Sundays.
They’re most likely to be detected between the hours of 2pm and 5pm, with an average of 35 detected in this time period.
