Ripchord Driving School
Oncoming glare on the Castlebar road
The clocks have gone back, and by the time the evening traffic thickens on the road out of Castlebar the dark has already come down over the fields. Most of the drive home to Ballina is done by the light of your own headlamps and everyone else's. For a few weeks the change feels new, and the glare of oncoming cars stands out more than it will by Christmas. Plenty of people say the lights coming at them seem brighter than they used to, and that a full beam is hard to tell from a dipped beam aimed too high. The eye can't tell them apart.
The lamps behind the glare
Some glare is nobody's fault. A car coming over the brow of a hill or out of a dip on the Foxford road will point her lights at you for a moment, however well they're set. A share of the rest comes from lamps that are out of line, and the figures on that are plain. The National Car Testing Service lists headlamp aim among the most common NCT failures, and in 2024 a total of 140,602 vehicles, or 5.03%, failed on it. That is a lot of lamps pointing somewhere other than where they were meant to, and some of that light ends up in the eyes of oncoming drivers.
A few other things add to it, and the Road Safety Authority (RSA) names them plainly. Headlamps on a left-hand-drive car dip to the right, and the RSA warns that they may dazzle oncoming drivers. Retrofitted high-intensity discharge lamps are legal only when they are type-approved, fitted to a car they suit, and only if the beam does not dazzle other road users. Fog lights are the plainest case of all. The RSA's page on fog lights says those used without dense fog or falling snow can dazzle other drivers, and that dazzling them is illegal under the lighting regulations. Its weather advice goes further, and says not to use them, front or rear, unless visibility is below 100 metres, roughly the length of a football pitch.
So the first thing to do about glare is to walk round the car with the lamps lit, and look at her the way an oncoming driver will. The NCT guidance asks for headlamps free of condensation, with clean lenses and reflectors in good condition. After a new bulb goes in, it should sit correctly in the unit. A lamp that's out of line looks fine from the driver's seat, which is why the check is worth making from outside. The same guidance suggests having the aim checked and set by a local car dealer before the test, though there's no need to wait that long.
The lighting regulations ask drivers to dip in good time when meeting oncoming traffic or driving close behind other traffic. The second half is easy to forget on a long straight. Full beam left on behind another car shines into the mirrors ahead, and dazzles that driver as surely as it would from the front. Daytime running lights aren't a substitute at night, and the Rules of the Road say that a car fitted with them still needs dipped headlights switched on at lighting-up time.
Meeting the glare
Even with every lamp on the road set right, there will be moments on the Ballina roads when a pair of lights comes over a rise or round a bend and fills the windscreen. The RSA wrote its advice for this with motorcyclists in mind, but it reads just as well from a car. Slow down, and look away from the lights towards the edge of the road. The verge or the edge line will keep her straight until the other car has passed. If the glare still blinds you, the advice is to slow down a good deal more, and to pull in somewhere safe and stop if you need to. There's no rush on it.
The glare that can be helped comes down to lamps set a little wrong and switches in the wrong place, and both are within reach of any driver who takes a minute over the car before dark. The notes on road safety in Mayo follow the season along, and anyone with a driving test day coming up in Ballina will meet these lights on practice drives long before then. For anyone sitting the test further afield, there is a page on the test centre in Loughrea worth reading in good time. Out on the road from Castlebar the lights will keep coming at you every evening until spring, and the most anyone can do is set their own right and meet the rest slowly.