Renting, that flight wouldn't have been authorised by any sensible flying club.
Its not any flying club's responsibility to ensure that all flights by their members are (a) safe (b) sensible or (c) whether the pilot is qualified to fly it.
In the case you've quoted, the pilot had no IMCR or IR, had over 100 hours on the aircraft and the flight could have been done VFR. So, if the guy had rented an aircraft from Turweston and said that he was planning to fly to Ireland VFR, I doubt anyone would have stopped him doing so. I've done a number of VFR flights under a solid layer of cloud at 3000 ft (albeit I have an IMCR). What caught him out was flying into IMC on a VFR flight, nothing to do with sole ownership of the aircraft.