Life is under siege from building works, whether on apartments or a neighbour's extension. Fight back, urges psychologist Marie Murray

How do you drive someone over the edge? How do you make them dread each waking day, knowing that hours of torture may await them? The answer is with noise. Legal noise. Building noise. The noise of progress and development. Noise is a serious threat to our physical and mental health. And it is getting louder.

Noise is measured in decibels: conversation averages about 60 decibels. Noise reaches painful proportions at 120 or 130 decibels. Over certain limits people become stressed, frustrated and irritated, preoccupied by the noise and unable to tolerate its continuance. They become unable to concentrate. They become obsessed with the cessation of the invasion of noise. The say the noise is killing them.

But its volume does not necessarily predict the degree of "annoisance" it will cause. This is because of the type, tone, frequency, pitch, contours and footprints of the noise. Adaptable as we humans are, for example, we often do not register residual or general ambient noise that is familiar and continuous, such as toneless heating systems - until they stop. We register what we require. Increases or decreases in noise alert us. Sudden noises startle us: the brief, abrupt backfiring motorbike. Low-frequency power-plant noise is intrusive. Annoying tones tense us, motors and grinding gears pounding rhythmically within our heads.

Advances in technology have raised decibel levels in all living contexts: the whirring, whining, slurping, grinding of the machinery of our lives - hum of fridge, whisk of mixer, whoosh of dishwasher - the chaotic cacophony of our existence.

Technology has also provided us with more ways to construct buildings. A problem of relatively recent origin is the intensity and extent of home reconstructions, renovations and extensions in former leafy suburbs and other peaceful places. Also, in the past, domestic development tended to confine itself to minor home improvements, the classic garage into playroom. These works were of short duration and noise level. The family lived on site. Work proceeded within family-friendly time.

But all has changed utterly. Residential life is under siege from serial, major building. Planning laws have not kept pace. No consideration of the increase in environmental noise is apparent in the oft-quoted legislation of a decade ago.

With prohibitive house costs the trend is to buy a small house and double its size, build another dwelling on any patch of excess garden, convert large homes into apartment blocks and extend backwards, upwards and outwards with projects that may subject neighbours to months of excruciating noise.

Although planning laws examine individual applications, they do not appear to examine the sequence of building projects in an area or consider noise from simultaneous building projects. Conceivably, a person living in a semi-detached house in a residential estate could have concurrent building projects, conducted legally on either side of, behind and in the houses across the road from their home.

The guidelines allow building noise between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. from Monday to Friday and between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturdays. This is 11 hours a day, five days a week. This is from morning until night. This is the longed-for lie-in on a Saturday morning. This is the shift worker returning to sleep, the night porter, fireman, factory worker. This is the elderly housebound couple. This is the student studying. This is the new baby, mother and father. This is you. This is me. This is the dissonant demise of the quality of our lives in the interest of progress. This is not OK, not personally, spiritually, physiologically, psychologically.

In western Europe an estimated 80 million people suffer from noise levels that experts consider unacceptable - and financial losses from environmental noise probably run to billions a year.

Here in Ireland a spokesman for the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Martin Cullen, says that legislation allows people to apply to the District Court for an order for the reduction, prevention or limitation of noise that gives reasonable cause for annoyance. A local authority can also require measures to prevent or limit noise. "This procedure is a simplified, low-cost process which does not require help from individual local authorities," he adds. The court charges about €15 to process the action, there is not always a need for noise-recording equipment and there is no requirement to be represented in court by a solicitor. So if it bothers you, prosecute and prove it.

But that means there is precious little the lone noise-demented citizen can do. What new mother, what frail diminutive woman, what exhausted man, what stressed student confronts the builder above the noise of the cement mixer to "notify him, seven days in advance, of intent to bring court proceedings"? What reprieve is there in the intervening seven days, listening dementedly to decibel levels to record their "unreasonable" discord? And who is the culprit if the building noise is from several simultaneous sources? What person goes into court without objective measurement or support of a solicitor against the might of construction corporations and at the risk of losing and paying the costs of confronting noise pollution?

Come now, Minister. This is not a solution. The process is rendered ridiculously risky and sufficiently unwieldy for noise victims to deter them from taking action. Noise just doesn't seem to be taken into account in the granting of planning permission. There appears to be no specified limit, nothing about the particularly deleterious impact of the startling stop-start noise duets in residential areas. What decibel restrictions are there? What restrictions are there on the duration of intense, invasive noise other than broad time guidelines? Where is the requirement on builders to warn neighbours about particularly disruptive activities? There is no apparent co-ordination of the start of building works, nothing to prohibit the start of one until the completion of another. There is no definition of the proximity within which a new work may not start while another is in progress.

There is a saying that only the fish do not know they live in water. We too have forgotten the "silence", tranquillity, the peace in which we lived before Luas and rat-running, before roadworks, gridlock and economic "growth". We have forgotten nature's sounds and the delight of silence. A reprieve from noise is our human right.

CALM, the network of an EU initiative on noise emission, recognises the importance of "quiet areas", the importance of conducting environmental-impact studies that recognise that "no person should be exposed to noise levels which endanger health and quality of life".

The issue of noise is an issue of public concern, of health and safety. It is one that warrants greater local-authority and legislative provision than appears to be available under the outdated 1994 provisions.

The solution does not lie in retributive mechanisms to prosecute builders for making noise, nor in paranoid prowling to read notices on local gates to object to planning applications and thwart good neighbours from improving their lot. The solution lies in proper planning and noise-pollution protection that prohibits the occurrence of noxious noise levels in the first place.

It is time for citizens to make some noise of their own. Time to protest before the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang.

Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin