I was almost run over by a motorcyclist, yet again, while crossing the road coming home from the local shop.

A crazy motorbiker, with obviously little regard for his fellow non-biker citizens, refused to slow down for either the impending roundabout or indeed my good self, and passed within inches of me as I darted up onto the footpath. An elderly American walking his dog saw the incident and duely came over to sympathise and express his outrage.

Irresponsible motorcyclists have long been a pet hate of mine after countless incidents over the past few years where I have been fortunate to escape without loosing a leg.

And don't say it doesn't happen. It happened to my grandfather 30 years ago and he's had a prosthetic leg ever since.

Roads are dangerous places at the best of times, but a disporportionately large amount of motorcyclists seem to think that normal rules of the road don't apply to them: they speed far in excess of legal limits; their velocity ignores corners, roundabouts and even pedestrians; they presume individuals will never change direction or pace and seem to take great pride in whizzing within a hair's breadth of passers by; they overtake whoever or whereever; and they treat pedestrian areas and footpaths as their own personal racetrack.

Dublin is the worst spot, with the streets apparently dominated by an army of cocky "professional" couriers seemingly on some sort of collective mission to turn the city into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I remember almost getting run over walking into my apartment door some years ago about 30 metres of pedestrian area away from the nearest road. I tried to grab license details but he was long gone.

I don't wish to tar all motorcylists with the same brush, particularly as some of friends of mine fall into the category in question, but there are far too many irresponsible motorcyclists out there and something seriously need to be done about it.

The National Safety Council revelealed last year that motorcycles represent less than 2% of licensed vehicles but motorcyclists account for 12% of road deaths. That's a factor of 6 times more dangerous. The NSC called for compulsory training and a requirement for learner motorcyclists to display L-plates. I don't know how much good it will do, but both suggestions seem reasonable to me, and they will surely help matters to some degree.

A year later and Minister Martin Cullen has not implemented the recommendation, despite the commitment existing in The Road Safety Strategy 2004-2006. The Garda Traffic Corps is underresourced and undertrained. The promised testing of roadworthiness for motorcycles has not been delivered.

Road safety in Ireland is a serious matter with between 400-500 fatalities occurring every year. According to the Department of Transport the trend is thankfully moving slowly downwards: in the 1970s there were about 600 with far less cars (about 10 fatalities per 10,000 licensed vehicles as opposed to a present day 2 per 10,000).

Nonetheless Ireland's record is still poor compared to its nearest neighbour (we rank in about the middle for EU15 as a whole): the UK has 6.1 deathes per 100,000 persons; we have 10.7.

This difference is all the more considerable bearing in mind the UK has a higher level of car ownership than we do. According to figures from Eurlife [2000], 419 persons in the UK out of every 1000 own a car, compared to 343 in Ireland. Germany has an ownership ratio of 521 out of every 1000 and 8.5 deaths per 100,000 persons.

The UK have been embarking on a determined strategy to reduce road deathes since 1970. It's long since time we did the same.

The Irish government's solution has been to deploy Gay Byrne to the task. We'll see how he gets on, but a good start would be to take on the motorcycle speed junkies who currently rule our roads unchallenged.

I noticed that problems existed with the blog when accessed from the URL eoinofiachain.com as opposed to owenfeehan.com. This was preventing users from logging in successfully, and denying them access to non-public posts.

I have since resolved this problem by redirecting all requests for eoinofiachain.com to owenfeehan.com.

If the problem reappears please let me know.

My personal apologies for this and any other teething errors that might have occurred recently.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of the card game, bridge.

As a small nation, Irish bridge normally languishes in the doldroms of international bridge, but in recent years Ireland has been growing stronger and stronger in foreign competition.

In what is a wonderful achievement, the Irish open team recently took the silver medal in the European Team Championships, coming second to Italy in a field of thirty three countries. A marvellous achievement!

A warm congratulations to Messrs John Carroll, Tom Garvey, Nick Fitzgibbon, Adam Mesbur, Tom Hanlon, Hugh McGann and David Jackson (NPC).

I note that the accomplishment also made its way to the RTE 9 o'clock news, unusual for the Irish bridge world. Bridge in Ireland is played by over 26,000 persons across the country so I hope this marks a trend that is set to continue!

The leaderboard and match results can be found at the website for the 48th European Bridge Team Championships.

A note also for Galway's Paul Scannell, Enda Glynn and Gay Keaveney who proudly represented Ireland in the seniors section, and as coach of the Irish women's team.

I am a passionate supporter of the European Union and of European integration and expansion. It has brought about countless economic and social benefits, too numerous to list, but ranging from preventing war to granting us all the freedom to travel, work and live all over Europe.

However, the EU doesn't come cheap and, unfortunately, as often tends to be the case with any kind of government, our taxes aren't always spent particularly well.

This post refers to one specific instance where I believe funds are wasted, and endorses a cross-party petition that has been set up to help remedy the problem.

The European Parliament, the democratic chamber of the EU, amazingly sits in two different locations. It is primarily based in Brussels but for four days in each month it ups ship and moves to Strasbourg.

This bizarre setup eminates from a squabble between France and Belgium two decades ago over who would host the parliament. The dual location emerged as a comprimise solution.

Now, moving files between the two buildings takes 10 large trucks on each occasion and about 30 persons to load them all. Much of the 5000-strong staff of the parliament also have to move. The estimated cost of transporting files and equipment is about €200 million a year.

Now I am sure you can all think of better ways to spend €200 million every year than on moving stuff back and forth between two locations every month.

Members of the European Parliament themselves have proposed motions many times to abandon the dual locations but national governments have the final say, and through successive EU treaties they have unfortunately ignored the wishes of the Parliament.

I, for one, signed the Oneseat petition calling for an end to this ridicolousness. And I urge you all to do the same.

Apologies for the brief period of downtime this evening as I upgraded to newer software.

You can now choose to receive email notifications of new posts by clicking on the Subscribe link in the bottom right corner after you register.