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Here in Ireland, double glazing is used as standard now. However, in Dublin at least, there are no rules on insulation, so despite fitting double glaze windows, the crazy builders/developers are allowed to build single-wall buildings with a simple damp-seal and plasterboard on the interior. No attic insulation either.

I'm not too sure where you're getting your information from but it's very wrong. Under the Irish building regulations insulation standards along with other building standards are laid out. (See Part L which was last amended in 2008.

Depending on the construction type single leaf walls may be allowed but a large amount of insulation would be required on the inside of the wall before the plasterboard and hardwall.

And yet rather than tackle such pathetic building standards (other regions of the country do have double-walled insulated buildings) our fanatical Green Party are insistant on focussing instead on having us all dwell in a netherworldish CFL-lit glow as they scrap ordinary light bulbs (you know, the non mercury-containing kind that don't make as much money for light bulb manufacturers).

Again you seem to be very uninformed, building standards are set for the country as a whole, the various councils in the Dublin region do not have any say over building standards, they do however have say over what structures can gain planning permission etc., this has nothing to do with the energy standards that the building is constructed to though.

That said, much anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that building insulation standards were not met in many building built in the last 10 years, but even then this normally cases of substandard insulation, not the total lack of it.

Also the Building Energy Rating (BER system came into force for all new buildings that have gained planning permission since January 2007, and all domestic building for sale or let after the 1st of January 2009. This is an energy rating certification giving an energy rating from A (Best) to G (Worst) in a similar format the energy ratings seen on electrical appliances in the EU. This gives buyers and renters an idea of the energy efficiency of a building and should help, in time, improve insulation values in buildings.

As for the Green Party, while I'd consider myself fairly environmentally conscious, I've never been a fan of the Irish Green Party. A large amount of their support seems to come from NIMBY issues. Becoming part of the coalition government has, in my opinion, been good for them. It has forced them to become more pragmatic. They have plans as far as I'm aware to increase the Part L building requirments over the next few years.

Also our builders/plumbers haven't a clue about properly designing a heating system, and work on an ad-hoc basis of randomly sticking in a few radiators around the place in an ineffectual manner and plumbing them in such a way that they barely work, with overpowered gas boilers that consume gas like anything to very little effect.

It really sounds like you've an axe to grind here, while it's true that heating systems can be badly designed and installed, labelling all the plumber and builders in Ireland as incompetent seems a little extreme. There are many very competent builders and plumbers in this country

Note I'm not involved in the building industry in any way or means, so I don't have professional pride at stake.

Hmm.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"

Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.

Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.

Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.

Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.

Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.

It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course :-)

It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".

One of the other great things they are doing here in Ireland with respect to this is changing the machines without testing! The trial that you mentioned was run on a Series 1 machine, but thanks to our system with large multiple seat constituencies (up to 5 seats) they are actually using the series 2 machine to which they have since decided to add the ability to spoil a vote! So all testing has been invalidated twice!

They are planning on a nationwide rollout which will involve the distribution of almost 7,000 voting machines in 267 local electoral areas. They are planning on using the machines in the June European and Local elections.

Now this being slashdot, I thought I should really give you all a few links to set you on your way (and even one which gets technical, to the level of analysing conforming to standard best coding practices and adherence to ANSI C):

• Press Release from 25th Feb confirming the government plans, and the establishment of a Commission to verify the "secrecy and accuracy" of the Nedap/Powervote system.
• Report done by a group oppossed to the current plans, analysing the requirements and the proposed system. Should include the lovely link to this 2002 report, obtained under the Freedom of Information act and found by google, which is the software test report on the system?
• Nice write up on the sort of rubbish being spouted about e-voting in Ireland.

The government's own guide to the electronic voting system has this to say on the source code:

6.3 Source code
The program source can be found at Nedap on the Specials_nts1 server in the /klanten/stemcomp/ierland directory. The bottom layer, the routines that operate directly on the hardware, are called the drivers and can be found in the drv/h and drv/src directories. The other layers called the application are found in the h and src directories. In the directory lang_h the language dependant header is stored.
Additionally only functions from the standard ANSI C libraries have been used, which are delivered with the compiler itself.

If this is not a publicly accessible server, why bother telling us where to find the source?

The other thing revealed by the document linked above is that the whole process makes heavy and totally unnecessary use of Microsoft software. We'll never have the source code to Microsoft Access, but that's the DB application which stores the ballots. Also, counting requires a bank of computers running Microsoft Window - surely this can not represent value for money for the State?

Ireland has a reasonably complex voting system. Each voter has a single vote, but can vote for several candidates in their order of preference. (Each constituency has between three and five seats). Even given that complexity, the system seemed to work well. There was about the expected turnout in each count center, and there were few concerns expressed about the usability of the system.

Some info is at http://www.environ.ie/electronicvote.html.