Donie's Ireland news BLOG Saturday

Irish motorists likely to get four penalty points for using mobile phones

  

Motorists who use mobile phones while driving are likely to be hit with four penalty points after a top-level committee backed the proposal.

The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications has outlined its recommendations on penalty point increases in a letter to Transport Minister Leo Varadkar.

The Minister had asked the committee to consider proposals on penalty points, following the publication of a report from his Department in June.

dangerous

As part of its deliberations, the committee met representatives of the Automobile Association, the Road Safety Authority and the Irish Insurance Federation.

Fine Gael Deputy Tom Hayes, who chairs the committee, said: “It emerged from our discussions that the use of mobile phones is viewed as particularly dangerous by road users and, accordingly, the committee supports the recommended four penalty points for the offence.”

In relation to speeding, he said: “The committee took the view that the increase in penalty points for speeding was appropriate but considered that it was best not to have graduated penalty points based on speeds in excess of the speed limit until the speed limits had been reviewed.

“For instance, it appears that there is a default speed limit of 80kph on many narrow, winding rural roads, which is often totally inappropriate.”

He said that the committee also believed that, in the case of less serious speeding offences, consideration might be given to lowering the life of the points to two years.

Points for speeding are suggested to go from two to three under the proposals.

Deputy Hayes said: “The members of the committee also agreed that the single most important factor in ensuring continued driver vigilance was visible garda enforcement.

fairness

“Furthermore, there was agreement with the recommendation that penalty points north and south of the border should be aligned.”

He said that the ultimate goal was to ensure that any proposed changes bolster the fairness of the system, ensuring that each penalty is proportionate to the gravity of the offence.

He sent a letter to Minister Varadkar yesterday outlining the committee’s recommendations.

Any changes to the penalty points system will be incorporated into the Road Traffic Bill 2012.

So much for equality!

Couples are more likely to divorce if the husband does half the domestic chores

 

• Study finds couples who split housework 50/50 are 50 per cent more likely to break up
• Experts say ‘modern’ couples who share housework have less respect for marriage

Ladies – prepare to be unimpressed. 

Researchers say couples are better off living in a ‘traditional’ household where women do all the domestic chores.

The Norwegian study, which some may fine rather sexist, has dealt equality a slap in the face by suggesting married couples are more likely to divorce if men help out at home.

Experts found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than those where the woman did most of the work, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study, said: ‘What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment.’

The researcher wrote in Equality in the Home that the lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising.

One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,’ he told the Telegraph.

The figures clearly show that ‘the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,’ he added.

Mr Hansen suggested this could be because couples are happier when they have clearly-defined roles in the relationship.

‘Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity … where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,’ he said.

‘There could be less quarrels, since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight.’

But he suggested the deeper reasons behind the higher divorce rate stem from the values of ‘modern’ couples rather than the chores they share.

‘Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage as being less sacred,’ said Mr Hansen.

‘In these modern couples, women also have a high level of education and a well-paid job, which makes them less dependent on their spouse financially.’

‘They can manage much easier if they divorce,’ he said.

Dr Frank Furedi, Sociology professor at the University of Canterbury, told the Telegraph the study made sense because couples who share chores tend to be from from middle class, professional backgrounds where divorce rates are known to be high.

‘These people are extremely sensitive to making sure everything is formal, laid out and contractual. That does make for a fairly fraught relationship,’

‘The more you organise your relationship, the more you work out diaries and schedules, the more it becomes a business relationship than an intimate, loving spontaneous one.

‘That tends to encourage a conflict of interest rather than finding harmonious resolutions.’

He said while the survey applied to Norway, he was confident the results would be the same in the UK.

‘In a good relationship people simply don’t know who does what and don’t particularly care.

‘Unless marriage is a relationship above anything else, then whenever there are tensions or contradictions things come to a head.

You have less capacity to forgive and absorb the bad stuff.’

The survey appears to contradict a study carried out by Cambridge University earlier this year which found that men are happier when sharing the housework.

The research, based on a study covering 30,000 people in 34 countries, found that men benefited the more they contributed to domestic chores.

But experts suggested this could also be because men preferred a quiet life doing housework than having a discontented other half.

Man killed in suspected hit-and-run in Donegal

   

A 47-year-old male pedestrian has been killed in a suspected hit-and-run incident in Co Donegal.

The victim’s body was discovered on the carriageway of the N15 at Parkhill outside Ballyshannon around 12.30am on Saturday morning.

A garda spokesman said a preliminary examination carried out at the scene suggests the man was struck by a passing motorist.

It is understood the local man was walking on the N15 near Ballyshannon town, when he was knocked down in the early hours of this morning.

His body has been taken to Sligo General Hospital, where the State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy is carrying out a post mortem examination..

Ex-primary care boss Roisin Shortall attacks James Reilly

  

A Minister of State whose shock resignation rocked the coalition Government has launched a blistering attack on Health Minister James Reilly.

Roisin Shortall, who had responsibility for primary care, said she has serious doubts about Dr Reilly’s abilities to reform the health service.

She also accused the Fine Gael TD of a lack of commitment to the programme for government, saying he wanted to privatise many of Ireland’s services.

“I had a series of differences with James Reilly and serious concerns about his ability to manage the health service and his ability to implement the reforms,” said Ms Shortall. “I believed he was going down a different direction towards the more privatisation, American-style route and I still believe that.”

The former junior minister left colleagues within the Department of Health reeling following her resignation on Wednesday night. She also quit Labour and has claimed party leader and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore gave more support to Dr Reilly following a series of bust-ups over health reforms.

Already frosty tensions between Ms Shortall and the Health Minister came to a head after Dr Reilly added two locations within his north Dublin constituency to a priority list for new primary care centres without her knowledge. Ms Shortall met the minister twice to discuss the issue, but he failed to give her a satisfactory explanation for his controversial decision.

Elsewhere, the former junior minister also refused to refer to Dr Reilly personally during a debate in the Dail when Opposition party Fianna Fail tabled a no confidence motion in the Health Minister. In the first official interview following her resignation, she said there had been no personality clash between the pair – but a series of disagreements over the direction of health reforms.

She told RTE Radio: “There was a situation developing over a number of months where it was quite clear that James Reilly and I weren’t on the same page. I don’t believe he really subscribes to the programme for government and there were fundamental differences.”

Opposition party Fianna Fail welcomed Ms Shortall’s criticism of Dr Reilly. Health spokesman Billy Kelleher said her remarks gave an insight into continued dysfunction and malaise in the Department of Health.

Ms Shortall became the fourth Labour TD to resign the party whip since the coalition was formed 18 months ago. She joins former junior minister Willie Penrose, who resigned over the closure of army barracks in Mullingar, and TDs Tommy Broughan and Patrick Nulty on the Labour sidelines. Taoiseach Enda Kenny later insisted relations between Fine Gael and Labour remained stable and played down speculation of a major rift within the coalition.

Sat navigators can ‘blind’ drivers to pedestrians on the road

 

Driving with a sat navigator can make you blind to pedestrians because trying to hold an image of the screen in your mind makes you ignore what is in front of your eyes, according to a new study.

While our eyes continue to see things in their path, the visual messages seem not to reach the brain when we are concentrating on something else because its ability to process information is limited, researchers said

Focusing on the detail of something we have just seen diverts our attention away from things happening around us and results in an effect known as “inattentional blindness”.

While our eyes continue to see things in their path, the visual messages seem not to reach the brain when we are concentrating on something else because its ability to process information is limited, researchers said.

The most famous example of the phenomenon is the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, where people watching a group of players passing a basketball around do not notice a man in a gorilla suit walking across the screen.

The new study shows that even without the distraction of several moving objects in front of us, we can still become “blinded” simply by trying to remember an image.

Researchers from University College London showed a group of volunteers images containing different coloured squares and asked them to hold them in their mind, and told to expect a flash of light.

The study, published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, showed that they were less likely to detect the flash when they were concerned with trying to remember the image than when their mind was unoccupied.

Scans of the participants’ brains as they carried out the task revealed a lower level activity in the brain region which processes incoming visual information while the patients were trying to recall the image.

Prof Nilli Lavie, who led the study, said: “An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav whilst driving.

“Our research would suggest that focusing on remembering the directions we’ve just seen on the screen means that we’re more likely to fail to observe other hazards around us on the road, for example an approaching motorbike or a pedestrian on a crossing, even though we may be ‘looking’ at where we’re going,”