Hell's bells

You know the feeling. You're nicely settled in the sunshine with a cuppa and something to read when it starts. Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw, it wails, an emergency sound with no place in a peaceful morning. You try to ignore it, but it's relentless. Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw. You can't think and you can't escape. You prowl the house in search of a room where the crude screech might be muffled a little. Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw: your brain starts to wail despairingly along. Suddenly it stops. Merciful, unbelievable, beautiful silence. You fill the kettle and start again. And just as you sit down: nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw ...

Ring any bells? The scourge of the unattended house alarm. It's the contemporary equivalent of a plague of locusts: baffling, bruising and, in most instances, pointless. It's unlikely that the house whose alarm has been ringing for the past two days has been burgled; more probably, its owners have simply gone on holiday. And here's the bad news. This is locust season, big time, as families take off for their fortnights in the sun.

So if you're afflicted, what, aside from cowering in a darkened room or attacking the offending article with a hammer, can you do? Many people's first instinct is to phone their local Garda station and complain. But while the act of complaining may make you feel better, it is a waste of time. (I once got out of bed at 5 a.m. and drove, hollow-eyed, to my local station to report that the alarm which had been ringing at 11.30p.m. the previous night was still ringing. The duty cop offered me a cup of tea.)

An errant alarm is, as the Garda press office puts it, "a civil matter" and stations can do nothing apart from check that the house in question is secure.

"The only time the guards would get involved would be if the noise constituted a breach of the peace," says a press officer, cheerily. "The station would then be able to take matters further."

She has never, needless to say, heard of such a thing happening. (Indeed, it's hard to picture a scenario where it might; perhaps if a patrol car were to arrive at the address to find the entire neighbourhood crouched outside the deserted house, howling.) Reading between the lines, alarms that repeatedly go off when they shouldn't are as much of a nuisance to garda∅ as they are to everybody else.

But if an alarm is running constantly on an obviously unattended house, how can it be of any practical use in security terms? If you were a burglar with any kind of nous, wouldn't you just wait until it had finished ringing, then nip in and do your business? Insurance companies, alas, don't agree.

"Insurance is about risk," says the Irish Insurance Federation's public relations manager, Martin Long, "and the more you can reduce the riskiness of a particular business - in this case, home insurance - the less premium you will pay as a consequence. Both house and car alarms which are fitted to an acceptable standard have a positive role to play with regard to reducing risk and deterring crime."

Anyone who is planning to leave a house unattended should, of course, leave a key with a neighbour - not just in case the alarm goes off, but also for ease of access to water, gas and other amenities. Basically, though, as far as the federation is concerned, "the inconvenience of noise is not an insurance issue".

It may become one, though, because most insurance policies now insist that the company won't stump up if the alarm on a burgled house isn't up to scratch. A couple of bank holidays back, an alarm began to ring at a house on our road some time on Saturday and went on ringing - continuously, night and day - until the owners got back from their weekend break. An acceptable standard? Not according to Dr Ian Cowan of the National Standards Authority of Ireland.

"In the Irish standard, which is voluntary rather than mandatory, the time for an external alarm sounder is 15 minutes minimum and 30 minutes maximum," he says.

"Then there's a minimum time before it can start ringing again and a maximum number of restarts, which I think is three.

"It's actually changing, though, because the Irish standard is being superseded by a European standard; so the maximum ringing time will be lower."

Good news? Maybe.

"The practice in Europe is to make the sounders of a more intense decibel output with a much shorter time period. In some countries, like Germany and the Netherlands, they have very, very high sounders - 120 decibels - but they run for one minute maximum.

"That would be too much for most of us, so we ended up with something in between. But the major reason why the things are driving people mad is not because the Irish standard is inadequate, but because they're not complying with the standard."

Of course, what most of us want to know, when maddened by bells, is: can we sue? The answer is yes - sometimes. The law relating to noise as a nuisance is enshrined in the Environmental Protection Agency Act, 1992, and explained in "A Guide To The Noise Regulations", a leaflet from the Department of the Environment and Local Government.

"There's a general provision for dealing with a noise nuisance," says Noel Sheahan of ENFO, the environmental-information service. "This complaint is not specific to house alarms, but you can make an application to the district court for an order to prevent or limit any noise nuisance."

This provision applies, according to the leaflet, "whenever you consider a noise to be so loud, so continuous, so repeated, of such duration or pitch or occurring at such times that it gives you reasonable cause for annoyance". You fill in the form on the back, apply to the clerk of your district court for a hearing date, inform the person you're planning to take a case against, and off you go.

If you aren't keen to do this alone, you can consult your local authority, which has a lot more clout than you do and may be able to produce a noise-pollution expert to plead your case. John Healy, an environmental-health officer who specialises in air- and noise-pollution problems at D·n Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal and South Dublin County Councils, says the number of complaints about noise has increased hugely over the past couple of years.

He rarely deals with house alarms, except in extreme cases. "If they're running for more than 15 minutes, or if they go off the next day again and the next again, or maybe a couple of times a week, then that's wrong. But you'd be amazed at the things that happen. One woman was triggering her house alarm every time she left the house - actually setting it off every time she closed her front door behind her. She genuinely thought that was the right thing to do."

If you think that's bad, be thankful you don't live next door to a pub that features "live music". Or a supermarket: greatly extended opening hours mean the merry sound of trolleys banging around and delivery vans arriving at ungodly hours.

Then there are the north Dublin bird-scarers. A very bad pub band? "They're like cannons which are fired over the fields in the north of the county to keep the birds away from the vegetables," says Healy. "Consumers want absolutely no bird damage to fruit and vegetables - but somebody has to pay the price, unfortunately."

At the moment, we're all paying the price for house alarms. We now have by-laws relating to drinking in public places and by-laws relating to dogs on beaches. When will we get a by-law relating to the alarming behaviour of the house-owning classes?