Car tax, motor insurance and NCT discs could soon be a thing of the past, the Department of Transport has confirmed.

A Department of Transport spokesperson told Newstalk it is "looking at digitising motor tax, insurance, NCT and CVRT discs".

"The printing and mailing of these discs incur significant cost to the state agencies and businesses involved and is no longer required given technology and data sharing advances," they said.

Car documentation could go paperless as early as 2026.

Newstalk Business Editor Joe Lynam said information like the Irish Motor Insurance Database will need to be updated on a daily basis if car discs are digitised.

“That needs to be kept up to date and up to the minute,” he told Newstalk Breakfast. “Because people register and deregister their vehicles. 

“If that is not fully digitised and not fully up to speed, then there will be a problem fully digitising [car discs]."

He said it would be “easy” to develop paperless car tax and NCT documentation as those databases are already kept up to date. 

A member of the Garda Traffic Corps outside Dublin City Hall, 4-3-20. Image: RollingNews.ie

The Motor Insurers' Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) started providing a daily motor insurance database to identify cars driving without insurance in November 2023.

The Department spokesperson noted information displayed in paper discs is already available to Gardaí "in digital form".

"With the advance of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology and increasing data sharing between relevant bodies, visual checks by AGS members are already being replaced by roadside, camera-based identification of non-compliant vehicles," they said.

Digitised car tax discs

Mr Lynam said he has always ‘hated’ the discs and said it’s about time Ireland got rid of them. 

“Ireland is one of the very few countries that still has the little discs in the windows,” he said. 

“They’ve digitised this in the UK for a decade now already – this is what we’re aiming to do eventually. 

“No formal plans have been announced but it looks like officials in the Department of Transport are getting ready for a digital world.” 

Paperless discs have been used in the UK since October 2014.

The Sunday Times in the UK reported in 2015 that the decision to scrap the tax disc in cars resulted in £45 million a year in lost revenue. 

That was due to people failing to register their cars properly, equating to more than 500,000 vehicles without valid tax.