Richard Wright RIP

Time to go listen to 'Us and Them' one more time...

Aftermarket HIDs should be banned.

Been blinded by ridiculously blue headlights recently? Then it's happened to you too... There are cheap aftermarket HID kits available on eBay and so on that allow you to place a HID 'bulb' in the place of your standard bulb in your headlights. While these lights, like the factory fitted options, output 3 times as much light as standard halogen bulbs, they are not managed in the same manner, hence the dangerous illegal glare they produce. Factory-fit HID lights use different reflectors to handle the different size, shape and orientation of the light source (it is an arc in a HID light, not a filament) to avoid glare and ensure a clean, correct beam pattern. They are also required, by law, to have a self-levelling system installed to stop them blinding other motorists due to longitudinal car attitude. This normally consists of either automatically-levelling headlights, or self-levelling rear suspension. Now compare this to the aftermarket installation. You take out your halogen filament bulb, with the filament a certain length and orientation, and replace it with a HID capsule that has a light source in a completely different location, and you expect the existing reflector to somehow produce the same, legal, beam pattern? Well, of course it doesn't. Light gets scattered everywhere. And to compound this error, the headlights don't self-level either. I was behind a car fitted with these HIDs recently, and when he was driving behind a white truck no beam cut-off was visible on the rear of the truck, just a complete wash of blue-white light. The poor truck driver was probably being blinded by his rear view mirrors. The Garda need to do the sensible thing and start giving these people points on their licence. They could also do something about the illegal numberplates while they were at it! You know, the yellow rear plates you see everywhere, even though the car is NOT from the UK; or the scripted fonts that make the plate unreadable...

What is the Government doing to education?

Before today's budget, things are already looking bad, with cutbacks hitting "minority" subjects like Music, Tech Drawing and so on. So the government is rewarding students who show talent and ability by removing the option from their school? Brilliant thinking. That was sarcasm, by the way. I am pointing it out because at this rate future school leavers will be unable to spot it... Leaving Cert Applied support is looking shaky, as is the Transition Year program. The government seems to be maintaining its bully tactics of picking on the weakest sectors, but undermining the education of our children is nothing short of stupidity. It's the primary advantage we have at present in the global economy. What will be revealed at 3.20pm today? Hopefully not more short-sighted lunacy... If you don't educate people, they are less likely to generate revenue in their future to support the country, so you are starting a pattern of running in ever decreasing circles...