In the mid-1990s I bought a second-hand Honda Civic. It was stolen from outside my house six weeks later.
The thieves crashed it at a roundabout in Ballyfermot and pushed two of the wheels right under the chassis.
This happened within hours of the car being stolen, yet it was a week before I heard that the car - or what remained of it - had been recovered.
Curiously, this information came not from the gardaí, but through a call from my insurance company.
I went to visit the car in its resting place in a compound in west Dublin. It was badly damaged, and so my main concern was to have it officially written-off so I could recoup my outlay from the insurance company.
An engineer sent by the insurers duly certified it as a wreck and I was paid my money. Strangely, half the money came as a cheque from the insurance company and the rest was paid to me in cash by the owner of the storage compound; I remember him peeling a series of large-denomination notes from a brown envelope and handing them to me as he looked furtively around the yard.
I remember wondering whether the car would really be written off and sent for scrap.
Something told me this wasn't going to be its fate, but I couldn't have imagined the awful end this story would have.
Two years later, I received a call out of the blue from a garda in Pearse Street Station. I was asked about my ownership of the car; when it began, and when it ended.
I still had the tax and insurance papers and was able to produce these when I was interviewed by the garda.
The officer, satisfied that I had parted company with the car at the time of the crash, eventually told me why she was investigating it.
It turned out the car had been put back on the road, and that it had been involved in a crash in Co Kildare in which a teenage pedestrian had been knocked down and killed.
I don't know whether the garda eventually brought any prosecutions in this case, or what became of the car.
I signed a statement but haven't been called to give evidence in any proceedings.
At the time of the crash, I was intensely annoyed, and even suspicious, at the way it was investigated and my car sent to a scrappage yard.
I lost an amount of valuable rock-climbing equipment which had been in the boot, and would have been of no use to the thieves. If I had known the day after the theft where the car had been abandoned, I might have been able to recover the equipment by making a few local enquiries, but seven days on was too late for that.
All that pales into insignificance after I learned that someone has died because a car which had been written-off was put back on the road.
I still ask myself why I was never told by the gardaí that my car had been recovered; why it took a week to learn from the insurance company that it had been recovered; and, most of all, how it was that it ended up back on the road?
