Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
It is the shrill, incessant, maddening soundtrack to the economic boom. At any time of the day - and several times during the night - your street will echo to the sound of a house alarm squealing for attention, or vibrate to a car alarm's unrequited honking. Throughout the housing estate, residents will become increasingly fretful. From their sittingrooms, people will be wondering if they shouldn't do something.
They'll peek through their blinds to see where it's coming from. And eventually, they'll decide that it's time to act. At which point they'll turn the telly up even louder, because they wouldn't want to miss a key moment in The Bill.
Modern alarms really are impressively sensitive. For example, simply putting your head to the pillow at the end of the night has the ability to trigger an alarm in a house directly across the street. Which itself manages to trigger off the bark of every dog within a one-mile radius. It would be an impressive anti-burglar device, if the alarm wasn't in fact alerting the neighbourhood to the fact that a spider had just wafted onto the windowsill.
Occasionally, usually by about day three of aural torture - when you realise that the alarm isn't going to evolve the intelligence to turn itself off - proper action is required. You call the gardaí, and they promise to do a drive-by and check it out. So, they do that and confirm that, yes, the alarm is going off, and no, nobody seems to be home, and yes, it's four in the morning, and no, they can't do anything about it. So you begin to wonder if it can really be a crime to break into somebody's home to turn off an alarm that's falsely claiming that somebody's broken in.
There is a certain idealism behind a house alarm that doesn't seem to be matched by the wailing reality. The idea is that when a burglar prises open a window, the brain-stabbing bell rings out, and, afraid of being collared, he scarpers forthwith. The reality, however, is that when a falling leaf brushes against your window and triggers the alarm, it drives your neighbours completely insane until you finally get home to turn it off. There really is nothing like coming home from a relaxing two-week holiday in the sun only to find out that your house alarm has been wailing since the moment you turned the corner for the airport.
The only upside is that in today's socially-fragmented housing estates, because you weren't talking to your neighbours before you went away, at least no great adjustment is needed when you get back.
