<<*nobody* came up with the idea to change the distance signs to miles, in any of the letters, editorials or articles on the subject.>>
I'd prob put this down to two things: 1) The Irish (as you have said) don't have an "attachment" to imperial measures as such. 2) The notion of "going in a direction" is hardly ever reversed out in political terms. The journey had started and the politicians decided to keep going to the end. The people would not expect to "reverse back". Psychologically it�s a one way street. The issue in california (that they "went back" to imperial) is different. There visual metrication process really never got off the ground. To go back to miles totally in Ireland would have been very radical, to go forward to completion is merely a tidying up exercise of the original intention. I'd ask - why weren't both done at the same time? <<but this poster said he "cut his teeth" on the continent, so he probably did most of his driving there, and was therefore unfamiliar with mile distances.>> Fair enough, although I've noticed that continental colleagues that have come over tend to get used to miles quite quickly. <<Completely true. Anyone familiar with imperial units here is remembering back to their primary school days (assuming they are old enough!), when we had to learn all about rods/poles, furlongs, yards, miles, feet & inches.>> Yoiks - it appears that Irish schools retained the teaching of 'evolved-out' units more than British Schools. I was never knowingly taught imperial measures at school. They'd removed it from the curriculum. After I'd left school (in the late 80's) they reintroduced it again! I learned "from the streets/peer group/family/etc". <<Do you remember pounds, shillings and pence ?>> The furthest I can remember back is 5p called "5 new pence". The decimalisation thing was "before me" do to speak. Don't ask me how many p's in a � there were! <<Does it not seem now like an unnecessarily complicated and clumsy invention ?>> I don't know, I've never been shown the pros and cons (I assume 'dividability' was the main pro). Personally I believe that money matters are best done decimally. With cash registers and computers being digital it makes things easier. Measures and currency I see as very different things. Firstly you cannot have dec and non-dec currency cirulating at the same time and secondly there is no "convenience factor" associated with "choosing the appropriate denomination". Metric and imperial are very different things and I do not feel an ounce (sorry) of hypocrisy in preferring dec-currency over non-dec. In the same way as I don't feel I might be "letting the side down" when choosing , say, mm over 1/16th in - despite me generally preferring imperial. <<The balanced position is to welcome initiatives that make sense, and oppose initiatives that don't, rather than reject everything that smacks of "coming from Brussels". Perhaps (no offense here) we are not as encumbered with outdated delusions of empire as some of your compatriots are.>> Personally I am very anti-EU and would like the UK out of the EU on both social, economic, political *AND* sovereignty issues. As far as delusions of empire even my only living grand-mother isn't old enough to remember such a thing. However, I am proud of the commonwealth - but not for reasons of "harking back to the empire", regardless of both the good and bad things empire brought with it. P.S. I'm Welsh (just in case you'd want to know! :-) ) <<At the risk of going off topic, isn't this something along the lines of "Do you wish to ratify the European Constitution ?" ?>> It's a bit more muddled than that - I think. Something along the lines of whether we should say yes or no to something someone's going to say yes or no to - I kind of "if you say no then it might go against others saying yes type thing". Whichever, it's going to get stick from both "camps" for either being to vague or not commiting hard enough.
