How many here are members of MAG Ireland?

murphaph

Just wondering. We all complain on here about insurance and the Gardai not pulling over provisionals (I am one!) carrying pillions and doing them for it and so on, but who here is a member of MAG? I'm gonna join this week. There's no point in us moaning on here, we have to get every biker we know to join or else government will continue to ignore us and we'll be left with totally unaffordable insurance (already getting screwed whil scumbags ride around illegaly carrying pillions who claim or riding without insurance at all and the Guards do nothing to enforce the law on this stuff-Hibernian said as much before pulling out of bikes).

The Doktor

Im a member.. but from what I can see the government ignore MAG too...

murphaph

How many bikers are there though? If enough bikers join then like any large lobby group, it will have to be taken seriously (the IFA being a prime example). I'm gonna join anyway. If MAG charged less (a tenner like P11) it might entice more people to join.

Garibaldi

How much *do* they charge?

murphaph

http://www.magireland.org/joinrates.htm

Individual, age UNDER 21 €15.00
Individual, age 21 - 25 €22.00
Individual, age OVER 25 €30.00
Joint €10 plus oldest member charge
Family (all at same address) No Longer Available
Club Affiliation €30.00
Individual (ONLY) United Kingdom UK£24
Individual (ONLY) EU countries € 30
Individual (ONLY) All other countries US$40 equivalent

Kazujo

I renewed at the bike show. Was a member a few years back.

robinph

I was a member for a few years but then they seem to have lost track of me and I've never got round to renewing again.

Eye

been a member since i started biking 7 years ago, but as was mentioned, mag seem to be ignored by the gov anyway. still though i do stay with them to show my support for the sake of all bikers on this fair little island.

Garibaldi

Any idea what current membership numbers (can't find any numbers on the MAG site) versus total licence holders is? If it's a large difference, then they must be doing something wrong. My brother-in-law was a member for a year or two, mainly just to avail of the discounts offered in some shops (a discount that was halved, I believe, in his second year of membership, so he didn't bother renewing - he then quit biking altogether when the babies started to arrive).
So, what good are they? They're, apparently, ignored by government, and they may not (depending on the numbers in the question above) be connecting with a large number of bikers. How do they hope to improve this situation? Answers of "Sure, it's only €30" don't count. If it weren't for threads like this, it'd be very easy to forget MAG Ireland even exists.

Owen

MAG? They're still around?

Sorry, I did the whole proactive MAG campaigning thing back in the day, and none of it worked. Government hasn't really paid attention to their significant campaigns in years, we still don't have direct access licenses 7 years on, no CBT for all drivers, still waiting for insurance, no response to the Tax demo 2 years ago.

TBH, until MAG get some decent PR action, they're in trouble. I agree whole heartedly, but the methods they use to get attention just don't work. People don't want to see a biker on the news complaining about tax/insurance/licensing, they just won't listen. Having people dressed in suits/construction wear/doctors uniforms/pilots campaigning saying they all have professional jobs but are bikers too might get slightly better results than having someone in tatty leathers and a hi vis jacket.

Their stands are virtually deserted at the bike shows, and while I again re-iterate that I whole heartedly support everything they do, I think it's time for a re-branding of MAG, in name, objectives, and methods used to achieve them.

murphaph

They could at least do with strting a forum or something to connect with people.

Hotblack Desiato

First off I should say that I've been involved with MAG at the national level for a few years.

Forums are very dodgy from the legal point of view unless you can put the sort of resources boards.ie has into moderating it. MAG depends on the time of volunteers and I'm sure any mod would agree with me that it's no trivial task, MAG simply can't afford to use the limited time of its volunteers to run a forum. MAG definitely can't afford to waste limited funds defending legal actions from a bike shop or whoever because someone on a MAG forum dissed them. It doesn't make any sense, but that's the way the law is, and until that changes it's hard to see MAG running or endorsing a forum.

Ned, while some of the points you made are valid, others are less so. Direct access is a big issue but despite MAG's efforts the Irish government is still totally opposed. The new EU licensing directive will force the govt to offer DA at age 27, but they don't even want to do that. Politically, bikes are seen as a hot potato and politicians don't want to be seen to be "encouraging" a "dangerous" form of transport. So for the last few years MAG has been taking a different line, pushing training and putting forward the view that training riders is better than just imposing a two year restriction (with no training) on them. You'd be surprised how hard it is to make politicians see logic.. they're just interested in what brings votes.

And votes is why there are no compulsory basic training proposals for car drivers. Hopefully the new Road Safety Agency will be able to push this through, as better training for all road users would make a huge difference to the safety of vulnerable road users including riders. Over 75% of car-bike accidents are the fault of the car driver and you won't make much of an improvement there if you don't train car drivers to look for bikes. MAG already has good contacts with the RSA and we hope to intensify this once they become fully established and take over responsibility for road safety.

Were you actually at the RDS bike show? I was on the stand each day, most of the day, and the stand was busy most of the time - previous years were the same. At the busiest times of the show we literally had people queueing up to join or renew their membership. Little throwaway comments like that are easy to make, whether or not there's any truth in them. It's hardly constructive criticism.

As regards your suggestion about bikers and professionals (or, as someone called it, the "village people" poster ) been there, done that, we distributed a full colour "bikers are voters" leaflet to all members before the last general election, and we'll be doing something similar next year. (and we've made contacts with a good number of TDs as a direct result of that campaign.) Yes there is some truth in saying that you have to wear a suit to be listened to - we've always emphasised that bikers come from all walks of life including suits... we've always gone out of our way to present a professional image when meeting government or agencies.

Media - the big change in the last couple of years is that when a biking story is coming up, the media approach MAG and not the other way around. That might seem a little thing, but it's very real progress (and took years of hard work by many people to achieve.)

Regarding what % of bikers are members, it's pretty good by international standards (typically 1-2% of riders) but it's still not nearly enough to really give us enough funding (e.g. employing a full time researcher) as most of the funds go to running the office and producing the magazine - costs in both these areas have skyrocketed in the last few years but we have managed to keep the membership costs the same. We suffer here because we're a small country with big costs, e.g. magazine postage has doubled recently.

It would be nice to be able to run the organisation on a tenner membership fee, but unless you have a one-man operation from a garden shed it just ain't gonna happen. The magazine is important as it's a tangible thing members get for being in MAG, it's surprising how many people out in the 'real world' use the internet rarely, not at all, or only in work.

With discounts, these are totally outside MAG's control, it's always been totally up to the shop as to how much they offer, and on what.

finally - yes MAG is far from perfect - but given the limited resources in money and, most especially, volunteers, it's the best we got. If bikers had no representation at all you can be certain that the position for riders in Ireland would be far worse than it is now. You can email office@magireland.org if you think there's something we can do better, but better still offer to do it yourself

Finally finally - if you have any whinges, complaints, suggestions, praise (!), stories, or questions you can send them into our magazine editor: roadrunner@magireland.org Articles from members are always needed (bike holidays, bike reviews, rally reviews, rideout reports, etc. etc.) as when we're writing stuff to fill the magazine we're not doing the other things that need doing... cheers.

Sorry for writing a book...

Eoin

murphaph

Thanks a mil for the update Eoin. I'm new to this biking lark and I'll be sending in a cheque tomorrow. I can't really understand just 2% membership in a country where the conditions for bikers are so appaling (high insurance costs primarily as well as lack of DA). I only mentioned the tenner membership as P11 used to be 40 odd quid and slashed it to a tenner and gained membership. I'd prefer an organisation fighting for my rights and sending me nothing/a letter instead of an organisation using the membership fees for magazines and so on. A tenner membership might attract a lot more members and the more members the more weight the messgae carries. Sorry for being an armchair general Eoin-I'm sure you've thought of these things already, fair play to you for your work over the past few years.

Can I ask another question or two, do you have links with MAG NI? They don't have DA either up there, do they also campaign for it?

Hotblack Desiato

Thanks Philip. The question of issuing a magazine or not has been debated back and forth a few times over the years - we reckon we'd lose as many if not more members than we'd gain and after you've cut the membership fee, you're not making more money. So instead we've cut the cost of producing it as much as possible (postage costs a good bit though, and posting a letter instead to each member would still cost a good bit of money while providing much less info.)

30 euro (with discounts for younger riders) isn't really that much considering that it's possible to make more than that back in a year with discounts when buying bike gear, oil, parts etc. and the membership fee hasn't gone up for a few years now.

We've currently got roughly 2700 members, which in one sense isn't bad, but it doesn't give you much of a budget to run an organisation on. A lot of costs (rent, rates, ESB) are more or less fixed, a 'minimum charge' for being in business, and being a non-profit voluntary organisation doesn't reduce these any

We estimate somewhere between 30-40,000 riders in Ireland so there's plenty of room for MAG membership to grow. (Actually, getting a hard and fast figure for actual number of 'active' motorcyclists in Ireland is pretty difficult.)

MAG NI are a region of MAG UK, and we keep in touch with MAG UK on issues like EU legislation, bus lanes, theft, parking and the like which affect us both. We're also both members of FEMA (Federation of European Motorcyclists Associations) who work in Brussels at the EU level - this is vital as this is where much of our motoring law originates nowadays. As regards Direct Access in NI, they don't have it as all of their driver licensing legislation is based on old Stormont legislation, and it seems that Westminster has been reluctant to do anything about updating it in the hope that the NI assembly will get going again. That's my theory anyway. They've had 'restricted' licences for 2 years after passing the car test in NI for years now, so there's no 'biker discrimination' angle to play up there. Also, it's probably a lot easier for someone with an NI licence to do the DA test in Britain if they really want to.

art

I've been a mag member for a number of years now and while I have very rarely ever looked for advice from the Office there, I appreciate hugely having a resource like that available, irrespective of the whole campaigning side of things, MAG Ireland is there to help Irish Bikers and it does a very good job given the limited support it gets (even from bikers themselves sadly).

My only regret is I never bought "Life Membership" before they done away with it!

Owen

ninja900 wrote:

First off I should say that I've been involved with MAG at the national level for a few years. *snip*

Christ that's a good answer. Very very impressed!

Hotblack Desiato

Thanks wanna volunteer for our 2007 'village people' poster?

Hotblack Desiato

art wrote:

My only regret is I never bought "Life Membership" before they done away with it!

I almost bought one too a few years ago when they were going very cheap!
But I figured MAG needed my 20 quid/30euro a year more than I needed a bargain
Under the old system, life membership was so cheap that we were losing money on them
It's still available... upon personal application if you can donate cash or kind of 1000 euro or more... and yes we have had takers at that price

saobh_ie

I've been a member since I started biking, All of a 18 months ago . I've been meeting to attend one of the monthly meetings to find out what the story is and ask some questions for a long time, I even made it through the doors of the Straw Hall once but didn't quite make it into the room where the meeting was on...

I want to see motorcyclists lot improved, both through the education of road users and changes to the law. I know MAG does its best, but given the numbers, bikers vs car drivers they are severly outnumbered. Still they fight on on our behalf.

Which is something else I'm consious of, I've paid my money, that's me sorted. I don't have to annoy any politicians, I don't have to post any letters, I don't have to do squat, MAG will do it for me.

I probaly should do a bit though...

Hey ninja, what can we do to help... so long as its cheap and doesn't take up a huge amount of time?

Can I do anything to help for an hour or two here or there? *

What do you need dude?


*Not a gauranteed offer of help but maybe, not valid for washing of your bike.