Myopia

Over the past few years many organisations and associations have been working together to put a stop to the abuse of disabled car park spaces in this country. People like the "Irish parking association" have been working alongside the "disabled drivers association of Ireland" to discourage and prevent abled drivers from abusing the disabled car spaces. It is a problem that puts our characters and honour as human beings at question. The days of the excuses like "im only popping in for a minute" and "I didn't see the sign" are now over with the recent crackdown by our Gardai on the matter and new technology aids the effort to stop this immoral act.

Police in this country are now well aware that there are a number of people out there abusing the blue badge system and many are going undetected. A recent study in cork by the irish examiner said that on one evening outside the south mall in Cork 38 of the 60 car parking spaces available displayed blue badges. After the traffic wardens and police investigated these cars, the following day revealed only 8 cars remained in the spaces with genuine blue badges. The blue badges were apparently being sold by city centre pubs, this problem however is not just limited to cork its a wide spread problem in our country.

New technology is now working with gardai to help them in their quest to stop these abusers. A system called Spacehog has been developed by a company in the UK, Disabled car parking Ltd. It boasts that reduces abuse of disabled car park spaces from 70% to as low as 1 per cent. The system uses visual and audio cues to warn abled drivers from parking in a disabled space. Sensors are installed in the disabled car park bays and when a car enters the space it triggers a "talking sign" and plays a recording telling the driver that this plac

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