Noise disputes often get resolved successfully through the services of a professional noise mediator. But most people don't know what mediators do, nor how to find one. In episode 23 of Soundproofist, we talk with two engaging and dynamic mediators from Arc Mediation in Waterford, Ireland: Roisin O'Shea and Shane Dempsey. They share tips on how they work together to solve neighbor noise disputes, one step at at time.
Noise disputes often get resolved successfully through the services of a professional noise mediator. But most people don't know what mediators do, nor how to find one. In episode 23 of Soundproofist, we talk with two engaging and dynamic mediators from Arc Mediation in Waterford, Ireland: Roisin O'Shea and Shane Dempsey. They share tips on how they work together to solve neighbor noise disputes, one step at at time.
Cary (00:05):
This is episode 23 of Soundproofist. And my name is Cary,
Phill (00:11):
And this is Phil.
Cary (00:12):
And today we're going to talk about a subject I've wanted to cover for a long time -- mediation. And specifically noise mediation, because mediation is essential when it comes to noise disputes and every community needs mediators. Our guests today are Roisin O'Shea and Shane Dempsey. They're co-mediators with Arc Mediation Services, which is based in Ireland. They've worked on hundreds of cases with local authorities and they also train managers in public housing to help resolve noise disputes. A lot of noise issues are universal. And so I can't wait for you to learn more about noise mediation in this episode. Let's get started
(00:57):
[intro music]
Cary (01:03):
So this is exciting for me because I feel like this is the missing piece in a noise story. You know, we've covered a lot of the causes of noise and how to try to mitigate noise. We've touched on some of the impacts of noise on the environment, but we've never had the opportunity to speak to professionals who are doing one of the most essential services, in my opinion. Which is working between two parties who have a dispute and especially a dispute about noise. So I'm thrilled. Thank you so much for being here today.
Roisin (01:35):
You're very welcome. We're delighted to be here because for us, the more we all talk about these kinds of disputes and how do we resolve them, the more we globally link up the better it can be. You know, because we can share.
Cary (01:47):
Tell us a little bit about Arc Mediation Services. Is it a business or a service?
Shane (01:54):
It's a business. Yeah, so we set ourselves up in 2010. I came from an engineering background and Roisin came from, well, I'm going to say a legal background, but that's not quite true because you were an artist before you were in the legal business.
Roisin (02:08):
Yeah, I still am. So my starting was I lived as an artist from 16 through to when my divorce came about. And at that point I was in my forties. I didn't understand the legal framework. I didn't understand the language. I didn't understand what was happening. It got me so annoyed. I went and I did a law degree so that I can understand how to do my own divorce. And at the backend of studying law and the law degree for three years, I realized that legal solutions were probably the least-effective solutions for resolving disputes. And I went and I did a mediation training course, and that's where Shane was also doing the same training course. And we started to talk about what would we do with his knowledge as an engineer and my knowledge of life and law.
Shane (02:57):
Yeah. I was working as an engineering project manager. And so, you know, when you're managing projects, you need a plan. Right? So what I noticed in my mediation training was it wasn't oriented towards creating a plan for settlement. So I suppose this is what myself and Roisin came up with. We came up with a mediation model, which had a clear roadmap towards reaching a settlement, and then we tried it out and then we said, well, let's form a business. Um, it was a really speculative thing. There are too many mediation businesses in Ireland. It's a small country, it's about 5 million people. I think we're probably two of the busiest mediators in Ireland. And so, yeah, it was unchartered territory, if you will.
Roisin (03:39):
Yeah, because where we're at now, I'm coming up on 500 cases, completed mediation cases, and Shane's not very far behind me, maybe about 50 cases behind me.
Cary (03:47):
Wow.
Roisin (03:47):
So we've done a lot of mediation work and a lot of noise and a lot of conflict. And so there are certain things that we've begun to see as patterns, certain personality types that make conflicts more difficult or more embedded, and you begin to recognize them and you have to employ a different process, but it is about process. And it is about facilitating and walking people from the moment that they meet you to try and walk them through discussions and negotiations, to move out of the conflict and into peace. Basically, you're trying to come to a solution, whether it's a legal solution or whether it's just an agreement that's not intended to have any legal binding element to it. The same process applies. You're trying to just assist them. And we do it in two ways. Shane is the king of logic and rational thought.
Cary (04:40):
Makes sense for an engineer.
Shane (04:43):
An illogical engineer right. Is not a great thing.
Roisin (04:49):
And my strengths would be that I really like people and I love looking at them and watching them and figuring out what are they saying? Not just with their words with their bodies and getting the temperature of what's coming and not being said, but you can sense things. And Shane has that too, but it is a particular strength that I have. I also have a very strong, legal framework in my head that I don't say to the people in the mediation that runs in my head, but I'm always conscious that as we're walking with them, are they trying to agree to something that we know is completely unenforceable by law and we're not doing them any favors. And you guide them. But what we do at the very beginning, whether it's a noise dispute between neighbors or whether it's a breakdown of a marriage, we approach it in the same way. And so what we do is we do individual intake sessions with the parties. And sometimes there's more than two, especially neighbor disputes, there could be more than two. So what we do is we meet each one on their own so that we can hear chronologically what has happened. And we keep it chronological because it helps people. Because when people are obsessed, they bounce. They'll go 10 years back. They'll go, you know, they jump and jump and jump. So, so we still …
Shane (06:01):
I think that what it is, Roshi is the whole dispute is living their mind at the same time. So it doesn't have a sequential nature anymore. It's like the whole thing is bubbling up. But the difficulty is that means that the causality of "this person did this, then I retaliated" -- all that's lost to them. Right. So when you get them to tell that story, amazing thing happens. They start, if you keep them sequential, they start to realize that they have actually been reactive, that they are caught in a dance. I said, of negative self-reinforcing patterns. And they only get that. I think by someone like us bringing them to that story, what do you think of that, Roisin?
Roisin (06:39):
Yeah. And I think what guided us in the beginning about how we approached was many years ago, I was invited to be part of a small committee in Dublin who were part of the Good Friday talks. And these were the talks to bring about peace in Northern Ireland. And there was four or five committees around the country, but there were a team of six American negotiators who were appointed by then President Bill Clinton. And one of those was George Mitchell and they came to Stormont. And then they would come down to our committee in Dublin and they would sit there and there was five or six of us on the committee, including a couple of people from the British Embassy. And at that time, the British Embassy could not speak directly to the terrorists, could not speak to ...So there's a lot of kind of gentle easing of that particular big conflict.
Roisin (07:22):
And one thing that really struck me was George Mitchell said, "break it down into bite-sized chunks because if you try and sort out the whole problem on day one, it's too big." It's like Shane said, people are carrying too much baggage emotionally. So even a simple thing, like a neighbor dispute, which really is not very simple because it breaks our peace of how we live. But people come in with all of the angst and all of the energy and all of the moments and all of the perceived how many times they heard noises over perhaps the last two years or three years. So what George Mitchell was saying to us as this committee was his approach was to take one little piece at a time, break down that one little piece, gather information around us, get the facts in first and then have a factually based conversation about what actually is happening. And also acknowledge what is emotionally happening. Cause they can actually be two completely separate things. As Shane said, the causation may not actually be the noise. It could be something else. And so what you're trying to do a search and find.
Shane (08:23):
I think your art exhibitions were used for people that's come together and meet informally because there's situations where people can't actually meet formally. And I think that what mediation provides is a way for people who are entrenched in a dispute who are concerned about the loss of face, if they admitted they're wrong, have a kind of an informal discussion or a dialogue about maybe we could get over this. And that's really what the mediator is providing: the possibility of peace, not a guarantee, but the possibility, you know,. So it's an interesting job to be in. I sometimes say it's a bit like I'm still an engineer. I'm just a relationship engineer, a relationship mechanic...you know?
Cary (09:06):
Oh, it makes sense. It does make sense because like with solving any problem or getting through anything, you have to break it down into pieces. And one step at a time, as opposed to, I want an instant solution. And an engineer or a coder or someone is going to look at every single thing that needs to happen along the way. And it's a really good way of thinking. Systemic thinking, I guess.
Roisin (09:30):
And I think what we found when we gathered the facts first and we ask people to not jump to solutions because when they come to see us, if we stick to the neighbor's dispute space, there's two types of neighbor mediation that we do. There's private disputes and there's disputes, we call them "local authority." You probably say local government housing disputes. So it would be the state under two different spaces because the state properties are usually in poorer condition than private homes. Acoustic problems, because of the way the buildings are structured, can lend itself to noise.
Shane (10:04):
Maybe Roshi, not even poorer condition. And sometimes they're actually they're well-looked after, but I think the attitude of the resident can be different depending on whether they're a tenant or whether they're a homeowner, you know. Like their investment, their commitment. What do you think?
Roisin (10:20):
And I think what we do is we find out what has happened before we met them. So we either get that by asking them directly what's happened. And we start with neighbors. We start with, "when did you become neighbors?" So even if it was 20 years ago, we go back 20 years. Now we move them fast through the 20 years. Cause we're not counselors. We're not going to take multiple sessions just to hear the backstory. So we have a nice way. Shane and I co-mediate. We work together. So we have a nice way of keeping it like a chat. And yet we're focused on moving the conversation so that we can get that information, but they don't feel that it's forced or at least that's the feedback we get. And when we get the history, generally the noise complaints are a more recent coming into being, if you like. And generally there's something else going on. So if it's private mediation, if it's families, there could be an extended family dispute issue.
Shane (11:13):
I just want to gently ask some questions about it and get them. Maybe you're taking them on a bit of a journey themselves to question the things that they're saying, which are positions, which are preventing them from moving out a dispute or for moving to a resolution.
Cary (11:28):
Yeah. So speaking of where one party doesn't think there's a problem and the other one does, how do you, I would assume that one party contacts you the one who thinks there's a problem. The other party has not contacted you. The one that seems to be the source of the problem. How do you get both parties to participate? If only one of them might have contacted you?
Roisin (11:53):
Well that's my job. Always get a phone call from one person. That's it? Because people don't wake up on a Monday morning and both decided to have a problem at the same time. And generally speaking, family, private disputes say that our neighbor disputes generally speaking, it's actually somebody else that calls us. So an extended family member who says, we can't take this any more, going on in our family.
Shane (12:16):
"We're tired of this. Like it's been going on for years. So we can't cope with it.”
Roisin (12:20):
So what I do is... If it's an extended family member, I say, "okay, so who are the disputants?" 'Cause sometimes it's not entirely clear. And so I just say, well, look, I'll give you information about what we do because you reached out to me. Can you bring that to your family members? Can you ask them to call me? I'll explain to them about the process of mediation. One thing we don't do is have a discussion on the phone about what is the dispute about? Because we don't have confidentiality until they've signed an agreement to mediation. So you only speak about what the process is, how we could assist what we do. What's called mediation. Most people don't know what mediation is. And so we, as a profession worldwide have a huge job to do because people don't know what mediation is. So we've got to work on that awareness piece.
Roisin (13:06):
So we then reach out. And then, you know, when we send out the information, if nothing comes back, I get back to the first person. Then I say, look, you know, do you want to give me phone numbers? And I'll ring when I rang, one person will say, "yeah, there's a terrible problem." Generally speaking, the other person might say "there's no problem here. I don't know what you mean." And my response to that is if the other person says there's a problem, there's a problem. It doesn't mean the problem exists. It just means there's an issue. So would you be willing to engage in our process so we can unpack this and see what is going on? Why does the other person say that there's an issue?
Shane (13:42):
And then people would kind of admit, well, we know there's a problem. Yeah. We know we're not getting invited to that neighbor's parties. We know they're giving us funny looks, you know, we know that another neighbor told us there's tension in the neighborhood and all this kind of thing. And then it's like, okay. We said, there wasn't a problem. But really we do know that there's a problem. And in relation to our public cases where it's local government, we're being told by the local authority, there is a problem. There are formal complaints on record. We've investigated them. You know, we want you to follow up on it. It's difficult for them to say, when they're receiving letters saying, you know, your tenancy could be a jeopardy because you know, there's been 20 complaints about you, et cetera. "Oh, I don't know anything about that." Now we have had people who will say that. And then you have to send them the letters and you have to say, "please contact the local authority to confirm that this is an issue." And then come back to this. We can have a chat about coming to mediation. You know, it's a soft sell. Like you can't force anybody to come to mediation. It's voluntary by nature.
Cary (14:40):
But I think the consequences of not going participating in mediation is that some other party might get involved later, a lawyer or the law, if there's no other route for resolution. Is that a correct assumption?
Roisin (14:56):
That is a correct assumption. So the things that happen is the disputes don't go away. They escalate. If there's a dispute, that's at a level where one has called the police on the other, then it's escalating, it's embedded and moving up. And when the temperature moves up, it can move into physicality. So several of the neighbor type disputes that we've done, there's already been physical altercations between the neighbors. The police have already been to the houses. Now, we don't have guns freely available in Ireland. But if they were, I would dread to think what would happen in some of the work we do. Because things have gotten to the point where people feel so distressed and so angry that they physically go for the other person. So what we try and do is when we talk to them first, I did what George Mitchell suggested. And we ask them to call a truce. Temporary truce. It's just a ceasefire. We're not asking them to give up on their position. We're not asking them to sort of lose their legal rights to do something. There are complications. If there's a criminal prosecution pending why we started our work, but we're used to that. So what we've found is if we start that kind of work, that the state prosecutor likes to know that we're there. And then they can actually slow down the criminal prosecution if they're sure that it resulted from an escalation of tensions, rather than, you know…
Shane (16:11):
And I suppose just to say like the police force, the Irish police force is called the Garda Síochána. So literally "keepers at the peace." And they have a close working relationship with the state in relation to public prosecutions. So like they will say, "look, this matter, there's mediators involved. We think the temperature is reducing. Let's just slow this down." So sometimes it's a good point, Cary, there's a real incentive. There's a real and obvious legal incentive to try and resolve matters because there are negative legal repercussions, which could be imminent, right, if they don't. So that focuses minds on engaging in the mediation.
Cary (16:50):
When you go through this process with both parties and in the end, you let's assume it's been successful. And you come to, I assume an agreement of some sort, is it sort of something people sign that's binding? And if so, how is it enforced?
Roisin (17:09):
So again, when we go to George Mitchell, because George, you know, I took a lot problem. I problems identified the space. Cause he said, "be careful that you don't sign a permanent agreement too quickly" So what we do is we do an interim agreement and we trial run a period. And the idea is that ...let's stick with the neighbors and noise disputes. So we do what we call the neighbor and the neighbor plan addresses each of the things that they say have been a problem. So noise, parking, there can be multiple things.
Shane (17:40):
Anti-social behavior, you know, use of abusive language when they meet each other, there could be a whole platter of different things that they're aggrieved with.
Roisin (17:49):
So we write out a plan about how they will behave with each other and how they will move through this process. And if during the trial period, one of them says does really loud noise happening. And so we have a mechanism for them to log a loud noise. They can then message us. We keep their communications with us to nine to five. Because we, in the very beginning, when we did this work, we didn't lock it down, which was a really bad move. So I was getting calls at two o'clock in the morning and I was thinking, "I can't be doing this." Or the police would be calling us at one or two o'clock in the morning saying "you're the mediator come and sort this out." So…
Shane (18:28):
Yeah, this is the mad thing, right. But people will actually say the police surrounded their house. "No, no, hang on. This dispute has been mediated. You need to call Shane Dempsey or Roisin O'Shea. You need to call them now." It's 2:00 AM in the morning. Right. And you're thinking, well, I don't want to take a call. How could you think? But that's the one it's a consistent thing about people in dispute. They only think of themselves. Like the dispute becomes so all-consuming. They can't think "I want to get two people out of bed at two o'clock in the morning to talk to the police on my behalf." Right?
Cary (19:00):
And I bet there's more of these incidents that happen in the middle of the night than during nine to five,
Phill (19:06):
I certainly had that experience this week, where I had a dispute with a rental agency and they messed up the order and I'm trying to get a refund. And I basically had insomnia for two days because I was just up all night, just like arguing all of the points in my imagination with them. And couldn't wait until they could answer the phone, you know?
Roisin (19:29):
And that's what happens. And I think, yeah, it's funny. Particularly if people trust you, I mean, one of the things we try and do quite quickly is to make people comfortable with us and trust us. Trust us to be neutral, trust us to hear them. But when they start to really trust you, then they think they can call you two o'clock in the morning because you become part of their support system that, you know, that's how they begin to think about it. So what we do in the neighbor-plan piece to say, okay, so say you three times, one of you, or two of you, whatever was saying that these noises happening, right. We'll reconvene during the test period to go through: "What was that? What happened there?" Most of these disputes that we're dealing with, they have CCTV, they record one another. So we, we look at all of this, they send it all to us.
Roisin (20:12):
So we have photographs of how some of these cars parked half an inch from the back of the other car. You know, that it's aggressive parking. We have videos of people standing outside each other's houses and raising a finger. And we will look through all of this stuff. We never give out to somebody for how they've behaved or what they said. We just say, "we've seen that you did do this. What led you to do this? What led you to raise your finger? What led you to park so close to the car?" So that we can unpack it and help you not to do it again. And generally speaking, by the time you're coming to the end of your interim neighbor plan, you put in place a long-term arrangement. Now, if there's a continuing situation or could they keep talking about noise, Shane then can get very technical with people, which is good. So we bring in engineering background.
Roisin (20:58):
We bring in what I call the black box syndrome. So maybe Shane you want to talk about decibels and black boxes?
Shane (21:03):
Oh, well I suppose. Yeah. Like sometimes we would actually assist them to monitor noise that goes with things like sound level meters in the case of local authorities or local government, they have specific tamper-proof boxes, which they can introduce into a home. And if you think that neighbor's been too noisy, like you record, or it's constantly recording, and these provide a effectively proof, you know, and objective proof of whether over a period of time, there was noise or not. It's important to understand in Ireland, there is not specific decibel limits from neighbors. It's not like in the UK, they have just the decibel figures. We don't have that in Ireland. So what we have is it's called like a reasonable person standard to do with the duration, the volume, the intensity, the pitch, that kind of thing. And so you would have to make an argument in court via a log that this noise constituted a nuisance.
Shane (22:02):
And so people will log the noise. They will talk to us about it. And I think my background has been quite useful in exploring that with people, like, for example, in mediation, there's a concept of different kinds of conflict that say that people can be involved in and actually want to structure it. It's when it's not really your fault, it's a systemic problem or societal problem. So for example, building standards in Ireland only really improved in 2014, there was a, you know, "we'll endeavor to have soundproofing, good soundproofing between houses," but nothing specific. Then there's an awful lot of the housing stock in Ireland that has not terribly good noise insulation between houses. And sometimes…
Roisin (22:47):
They're also terraced. So that means that they're joined to one another. So there's only...and sometimes it's not a block wall that's dividing the two houses. It's just a stud wall.
Cary (22:55):
It's structure-borne noise. It's not airborne. It sounds like because it's going through the framing of the building, which makes it worse, actually.
Shane (23:02):
Exactly, exactly. And so you get this kind of unpleasant amplification effect. And so what we do is we help people to actually understand that this is not their neighbor deliberately doing this, this thing that they're finding unpleasant. Like for example, if someone closes the door and metal clanks against metal, you're going to get a, you know, a short burst of high-volume, high-pitch noise and it might be unpleasant, but it's not forever, but it's not your neighbor actually doing that deliberately. And so sometimes what you can do is like facilitate a conversation about how can we both improve this? Maybe we need to get soundproofing. Maybe we actually need to explore this. Maybe this is something we jointly look at. Because this is not a problem of a malicious neighbor who's doing this to me, this problem of just a neighbor who maybe has some kids and the kids want to play video games or something like that. And it's disturbing.
Roisin (23:59):
Actually, that's a good one. Yeah. We have one with the two kids around, I can't think what the game was, but they had to shout out ...that the kids were wearing the -- teenagers -- they were wearing headphones and whatever this game was, they had to shout out a name.
Shane (24:12):
It was something like Call of Duty. It was one of those first-person shooter things where they're working on a team or something.
Roisin (24:19):
The kids were obviously getting really excited was they were playing, but they were playing in a team and all the other kids and other houses, but you know, they're in the virtual world and they've got headphones on. So these teenagers are not aware of the volume coming out of their mouths. Exacerbating that was the fact that the father had put down a hard-paneled floor in that bedroom. So the acoustics, you know, so we literally look at, we get photographs sent to us of, we ask what's on the floor, what's on the wall. What is the wall a stud wall? Like Shane looks at things, like we're investigating types of sort of dense wallpaper. That's actually in the acoustic wallpaper that would bring down…
Shane (24:55):
Acoustic dampening. Because there's some situations like where people can't afford to actually to do significant modifications to the party wall. And so we're not just exploring the emotional angles. We're also exploring, you know, the facts. Yeah. And it helps people feel that they're on a path towards resolving this problem. So that's helpful as well. You know, we work in a team as mediators. I don't know if this may be coming across, but there'll be myself. And Roisin sometimes we'd have a third mediator who is an attorney. Who's very familiar with neighbor disputes ... Actually land disputes. And so they can provide some input. It's not saying, you know, get your own legal advice, but it's useful sometimes to just provide some perspective, some, a different viewpoint that the person in dispute can take apart from maybe some belief. "Well, I'm going to be able to ram this through the courts and you're going to have to move." Because that's generally the least likely outcome.
Cary (25:53):
And it would make people not want to participate. I think if they felt like they were going to displace someone from their home or that they would be displaced.
Roisin (26:02):
There is another piece to this work that really is an important piece. There's guy called Bill Eddy, he's actually from California. I think he's from California. It's the High Conflict Institute, but Bill has written a lot about high-conflict personalities. So in a lot of the work that we do, you will find there is a person with a high conflict personality. And what does that mean? If somebody who has got a personality type or some other issues going on, that they really get stuck into a conflict, they bite down on it. And it becomes almost like their reason for being. I becomes really, really important to them. The conflict itself becomes really important and that becomes a lot more difficult and that kind of can also have issues of emotional instability or well-being issues. And so what we do is when we see that there are some issues happening for somebody, we don't just keep on mediating. We also think, well, what kind of other support could this person do with, you know, do they need counseling? Do they need, you know, if it's a state housing, we're helping different local authorities think about how can they support people, whether it's a mental well-being issues. And that is actually at the root of the conflict. It's not...
Shane (27:11):
It's like, you can't just evict the person, right? Because they're homeless. That's not the answer. So you have to come up with something which is more subtle and nuanced, but still enables the neighbor, for example, that person to be able to cope with the, let's say a more unusual atypical personality next door. And that's okay. We're each entitled to our personality. And often the let's say complaints that person is making, or the upset that they're feeling or that they're displaying to their neighbor...That's because they are in chronic distress themselves. And so we're trying to deal with that. I would say sometimes I was talking to Roisin about this. Sometimes those cases there, isn't an actual nuisance noise that you could discern, right? With a noise meter or the objective measure. Yeah. There's that feel about.
Cary (28:02):
Yeah, it is how you feel.
Phill (28:04):
Exactly. The noise triggers, some emotional reaction. I had this exact situation. I lived in an apartment seven years ago for about three years. And you know, I have some guitars in the background, Shane, I see get some good instruments and whatnot. And I, for two years I would run, you know, Sunday afternoons. I would have two electric amplifiers and I'd be playing during the afternoon. And from my perspective, this is also another point that I wanna see if you could help me coin a cliche for this, but "one person's noise is another person's music" or, you know, something akin to the trash versus treasure cliche. I'm not sure how to word that.
Shane (28:41):
I would switch it around. I'd say one person's music is another person's noise. I think that's what I mean.
Phill (28:46):
Okay. Yeah. So for two years I would do this and no complaints from anyone. And then one day I'm doing that and there's a new tenant downstairs. And within seconds of me playing a note, they're at my door, like banging the door down immediately started very aggressively yelling at me. And, and then I was like, okay, fair enough. Like electric guitar amplifiers are loud. You live below me. But then it got to the point where I played the acoustic guitar, like with my fingers and they're banging on the ceiling with a broom and ...granted there's lack of acoustic insulation. So I can also hear the couple's argument constantly in that residence. So I didn't know about mediation at the time. I ultimately moved out because I was walking on eggshells and I, you know, it was untenable for me to stay there. But that seems to me, you know, emotional distress.
Roisin (29:41):
As human beings, we tend to live close to each other. We tend to like to live close to each other. So there seems to be
Shane (29:50):
We founded cities and found the beneficial, right. It's a thing.
Roisin (29:54):
Yeah. And then we created these urban environments where we really packed ourselves in. And like, there's going to be these tensions because to some people, the acoustic guitar is going to be utterly intolerable to somebody else. And electric guitar is going to be fine. You know, coming through an amp. Like one of the neighbor's disputes we had with noise, the person had a well-being issue. I say well-being as a very broad covering of saying that there was some other stuff going on that was beyond being upset. And when we really unpacked it and talked and talked, it struck me that what was happening was that this person's tolerance for any kind of noise was, it was way beyond any kind of reasonable person's standard. So any level of noise. So in other words, any neighbor in the house next door, even walking in the house was going to be too much. So we had a very simple solution. We encouraged the purchasing of really, really good quality headphones that she could put on when she was in the house with a long lead and plug it into her TV. The noise problem was sorted pretty much overnight. She was happy. The neighbor was happy.
Shane (31:01):
I would say, you'd have to wonder how much noise was a proxy, the noise complaint was a proxy for something else. You know, I wouldn't say we use the phrase, which is primed, right? So it's when someone, I think that's what you've experienced. Your neighbor was primed to get annoyed at the acoustic guitar, even though right. The sound level is lower and it's, you know, it's softer. Like it's just not able to create the effect of a solid state or a tube amp. Right. But having said that if the neighbor's psychologically primed, they associate guitar playing with irritation. I don't know if you've ever read Daniel Kahneman's research "Thinking Fast and Slow," but the associative part of the brain works really, really quickly. A lot of time, what we're doing is we're fighting to control our associative impulses, which happens so fast. So your neighbor's going "that GUITAR again," and it's not conscious!
Shane (31:57):
It's not like he is playing at a particular decibel level. That is annoying me. I am analyzing this. And I've decided that it is reasonable for me to be annoyed. It's not that at all. It's like just this bursting up of emotions and the person is annoyed. And when we get annoyed, this thing happens. We don't want to be lit. We're on justified in our nights. Why? Because we're good people. Good people aren't justified in their annoyance So then you have to figure out the rationale for why it was reasonable for us to be annoyed. So your neighbor asked to come up with a reason why Phill was annoying him because he's playing acoustic guitar and how dare you play acoustic guitar.
Phill (32:34):
I mean, to be fair, I'm also just generally obnoxious, so.
Shane (32:38):
That your own business, right? We're not your neighbors, you know,
Roisin (32:44):
But still you said something, you said that you could hear their rows, you know, the arguments that they were having. So there was other stuff going on that was triggering those two people and their living space. So an external aggravation was just perhaps even just a diversion away from what was actually going on a little space. Absolutely. I think, and this is why we really very strongly focused on facts and getting like Shane talks people through how to just even put things on their phones with an app. So they can actually record decibel levels. And, you know, we had one woman who kept recording the decibel levels of everything. She'd close doors and see what it was like. She'd have her son on his guitar, see what it was like. She liked to sing a few songs a night. She'd see what that was like. So she was actually recording her activities to see. And she became, she got an awareness of when she was hitting a certain decibel level or the fact that her house was, 'cause she was giving them kind of guidance as to where the decibel levels should really go.
Shane (33:44):
Well, they had a serious problem. They had a wall with a sound transmission class of about 32 or 33, right. Which is not really adequate for a party wall. And there was nothing they could do about it apart from investing in soundproofing. And so that was, that was difficult. A lot of times, sometimes noise disputes are genuinely about noise, but a lot of times our experiences, they are proxies for other things. They are, for example, the person who has a sick grandchild, who is really stressed about that. And then the noise of kids playing next door irritates them because it's a reminder of their own difficult situation. And the complaints come in and they're about neighbor noise. But when you unpack it, when you get the story, it's not really what's happening, you know? And so a lot of our knowing these cases are not really about, you know, sustained nuisance noise as it would be categorized under Irish law. They're not the kind of thing you would be able to make a case against, you know, to have your neighbor force, to abate or cease all such noises.
Roisin (34:45):
I think that answers something Cary was asking earlier, like, are these agreements intended to be legally binding? Or how are they enforceable? So generally speaking neighbor plans, Ireland has got standalone legislation to deal with mediation, Mediation Act 2017. And so the parties to a mediation, they get to decide if they want their agreement to be capable of legal enforcement or not. So legally binding or not. But generally speaking, a neighbor agreement would be very hard to enforce, you know, so the enforceability would be down to, are they able to prove sustain noise or noise as such? And because we don't have the kind of framework in Ireland to help people argue that easily. I'm not saying it can't be, but other types of agreements, lots of other disputes we do the agreements are intended to be binding. And so if there's a breach, people will take them to court. So the rentals such a way as to enable to take the documents straight into court and enforce it. In other words, the court turns it into court orders and then it's a contempt of court. If you breach, you know, if you continue to breach.
Shane (35:47):
The only circumstances where we writing a legally binding agreement between neighbors in relation to noise is where there was already litigation in relation to that noise. And that the agreement has to go back into court to prove that court that they've come to a settlement and then they can be bound to that. Otherwise they're in writing of course, right? Because oral agreements are very difficult to understand what was agreed, right? It can, it can stretch, but they're not legally binding in general.
Cary (36:12):
I want to back up a second, because previously you mentioned you first write an interim agreement, citing George Mitchell. Does that evolve into a final agreement? And is that the one that is legally binding? And what about the interim one? Is that also legally binding or is that just sort of a trial balloon?
Roisin (36:30):
It's really meant to be a trial run if you like, it's generally speaking that short agreement is not intended to be binding and it's a test-run period. Now, I think what's interesting about those kinds of test-run agreements that even if it falls apart during the test run periods, we're aware that these trade agreements that we've done have been brought into court. And so the judges say, well, actually, you know what? You did all that work to get this baseline. We're going to go from this baseline. So the judge's orders tend to reflect the work that we've already done with them, but yeah, you do your trial-run agreement first and then you'd have a longer-term agreements. And that usually it would be intended to be legally binding unless it's sort of state housing, like the local authority housing where their own rules and regulations are the governing piece. And this is more about better relations between tenants.
Cary (37:20):
It seems like if you can get the parties to agree to an interim agreement, that's the first step towards getting them to a binding agreement. Have you had instances where people don't ever reach the point of coming to an interim agreement or just won't proceed?
Roisin (37:36):
Internationally about 80% would be a good outcome for mediation. So 80% of mediation cases would come to an agreement. We're a bit higher than that. We have a higher success rate, but it would be normal that one or two in 10 will come to an agreement.
Cary (37:52):
That's disappointing, but still, I guess -- proportionally -- it's still a high success rate.
Shane (37:58):
There are cases like for example, with local government tenants where it's clear that one of the parties may just not really be particularly interested in mediation. So they're being encouraged by the local authority to come to mediation. But it's what they're saying to us is, "yeah, I don't really see this as the resolution to dispute." And we can work with the local authority to kind of explore that with them and see maybe they really should, but it is a voluntary process. And you know, if someone says, "no, actually I'm never going to sign an agreement." That's, that's what you have. And that happened, you know, it happened recently on, I think we've been kind of going back and forth on trying to wonder if there's anything else that we could do. But it's like, you're mediating based on the legislation in Ireland, it's a completely voluntary process. The parties have the right to self determine. And if part of that self determination is "I am not coming to a written agreement," that's their choice.
Cary (39:02):
So it sounds like also because you do deal a lot with public housing, it doesn't sound like cost is necessarily a concern like where, you know, getting a lawyer or something you might think I can't afford to hire a lawyer, but if you're in public housing and you have an issue, are your services available and paid for possibly through the housing authority or through somehow? So then it's like, there is no obstacle towards people in lower incomes from being able to resolve a dispute.
Shane (39:34):
Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. Because actually the local governments have processes, which incorporate mediation. So it's not like people who can't afford private mediators are unable to avail of mediation in Ireland, which is a really positive thing, you know?
Cary (39:49):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's wonderful. And you're in Dublin, right? So which is actually normally a very expensive city or no, you're not.
Roisin (39:58):
We're in Waterford. Where Waterford Crystal came from. But yeah, we're down in the south, but that's been a really interesting thing. The pandemic has completely changed our practice because since the pandemic started, we've done all of our work on Zoom. And actually, people are finding it really nice to work like this. Like the clients are finding it really nice, 'cause they don't have to leave their house. They don't have to go and find parking. They don't have to be stressed about going, finding the building that we're meeting them in. And we find that people, when they're sitting in their own houses in their own room, it's like Shane, with his guitars or Phill with his guitars. The more relaxed 'cause they're in their own space. And I certainly find mediation on Zoom really interesting. And perhaps a little bit better than face-to-face, which is kind of interesting.
Shane (40:47):
There is this really funny thing as well, where like people are talking, "oh, this incessant noise. Oh, I can't think, you know, with the noise." And you've been talking to them for two and a half hours on Zoom they're in their living room, but no noise at all. Then you go, okay, maybe it's just today ,..
Cary (41:05):
Well, I think also it is possible Zoom recording suppresses a little bit of noise. Like for example, there's some traffic driving by and you probably don't hear that, but I hear it. And you know, I have my own noise triggers, but the other thing I thought of when we were talking about recording noises and having people record the sounds is it's actually the type of noise that bothers people the most. It's very hard to record on a cell phone or something. You may even not even get a very good, accurate decibel reading on it because it's a low-frequency noise. And if you ever try to record those sounds like someone walking around, you may not actually pick up those footsteps very well. You may not hear them unless you had, I don't know, a binaural recording system or something. Or you need very specific microphones that are going to pick up those sounds because someone could record all of those and then they actually have no really viable proof that the sound is really disturbing, even if it might be something.
Shane (41:59):
And that's a really good point because the boxes which are designed to log sounds, they tend to have binaural microphones. They're very expensive systems, right? It's an interesting thing like, yes, we accept that those noises could be annoying. We're not making a determination as to what is reasonable for a person to be triggered by. The difficulty is the law does not say that that is an annoying noise. And so there are things that you can become really, really infuriated by, but they don't coincide with what is legally problematic from a neighbor. And so this is where you're trying to have this conversation about, we know something is distressing you, but you don't actually have legal remedy on this. So we have to work something else out. And I agree. I mean, cell phones are not the best to record low-frequency noises, the decibel. Yeah. I mean, you might pick them up, but you're not conveying the negative feeling that someone has when they're experiencing it. I totally get that. And that's difficult then for people to say, because they're showing you an app and they're, "but you don't understand." Well, I actually do.
Shane (43:08):
I have, I have two different concerns. One is your experience, which is valid, right? And the other is what is legally reasonable. So for example, local government is not obliged to stop someone from making a noise, which is irritating, but is not a nuisance. So like this is the difficult part that we have to walk like the middle way, you know?
Cary (43:32):
Yeah. I think, well, one of the articles that we have on the soundproof is website, the most popular article is about neighbor noise and little things you can do. And I think the concept of that was to kind of, again, we we've talked about really sort of a no fault kind of situation where you have housing and this is certainly true in the United States also. It's simply not built to standards that would actually prevent noise from traveling like that. I actually think sometimes older housing, I don't know, like Germany, for example, I've been in homes in Germany that are like fortresses. But we have a lot of wood-frame housing here and it is just like acoustic guitars. Yeah, very resonant. And so people are living their normal lives in these homes and they are probably deeply shocked when a neighbor approaches them and says, you know, you're making too much noise.
Cary (44:28):
You know, they might think "I'm just like cooking dinner," you know, but they're opening and closing their cabinets for example. And it sounds like, "what is that?" You know, bang, bang, bang, bang, and it's just, they're opening and closing doors and cabinets. And so I think that sort of increasing awareness like, "oh, you can still do that, but maybe put these little soft pads on the inside of your cabinet doors," for example. That article is about those kinds of things. Like just nobody is trying to harass you and you're not trying to harass anyone else. There are these little things you can do for less than $5, you know, that might help.
Roisin (45:05):
That's the kind of thing...that's exactly. We talk to them about putting little pieces on the doors. Just little rubber things that are really inexpensive, to stop that really loud banging. Yeah. I think you're right. The great way of dealing with this is to, if you can find out factually that the divider wall is poor quality. If you find that out fairly quick, they, you can say to both parties, look, this isn't your fault. This is actually a construction issue. So you're telling us you're going about your life, like a normal person. So it isn't, you're not deliberately trying to do this. And when you communicate that to the other person to say, "Look, we've talked to them and they're really not deliberately trying to do anything. However, we've learned that your partition wall is particularly bad. So here are the things you could both do." And that's something that we do too, is get going to think about what can we do to reduce the aggravation we're causing to the other person on our side of the wall.
Shane (46:00):
Yeah. Yeah. So you make it a common interest. You make it a common project they collaborate on to fix the noise problem. And then you've got to tailor that to the budget that they have. Right? And then you can have structural issues, sorry, structural conflict, where let's say the house is owned by a local authority, for example. So they're local authority tenants, and there is not the budget this year to fix this. It will be there next year. So why don't we do it in the interim period of time while this problem exists? And I'll say as well that we had this, we developed a fascination in Ireland. We used to have like entirely Blackbelt houses, you know, Ireland loves their brick houses. But in the early noughties, right between, well, let's say about 1999 and 2006, 2007, when the economy then started to tail and we all know the credit crunch and whatever those houses were built to a different standard, they were fast-built timber homes.
Shane (46:58):
Semi-detached so, you know, one partition wall, and those are the houses that we would see a lot of let's say problems with because the billing codes that specified the sound transmission class only came around in 2014. And so you had this best endeavors from 1999 until? And so there are thousands of houses now. Thousands doesn't sound like a big number, but we're not a big country. We're only 5 million people. There's a lot of houses. And basically they have these problems. So like an accommodation needs to be come to. And the other fascinating thing that they did was there was a trend for wood floors. So you've got that wall and then you got the resonance to the wall and then you've got the wood floors on either side. And it's a recipe for disaster. It's not the residents' fault. It really isn't, you know.
Cary (47:53):
Not only is there an STC standard finally, but it also an I I C standard for Impact Insulation Class. I think that's what it means, which is for those kinds of floors and that just got established and it's barely, the minimum standard. And most homes fall below that minimum standard that was established. And everyone's being driven to madness by these footsteps in some of these homes that were built in the last 40 years.
Shane (48:17):
And that's a good point. It's the same situation here. We only have those standards coming in since 2014. Didn't have to think about it before 2014.
Cary (48:26):
Thank you for your time. I know you need to go. This was wonderful. I think it's such a tremendous service and there's not enough people doing what you do. And I hope that more people take an interest in becoming mediators, doing what you're doing in more locations, you could end up because you work on Zoom. Now you could end up with people contacting you.
Roisin (48:47):
We also don't mind mediators reaching out to us and wanting to talk about what we do, because we wanted to share what we do and share our experiences with others who are trying to do the same kind of work.
Cary (49:00):
I'd like to thank Roisin and Shane for joining us today on the Soundproofist podcast. So I'll post their contact information on the Soundproofist blog for this episode. You can find their website at arcmedlaw.com. That's a R C M E D L a w.com. I hope you got inspired by this topic. And thanks for listening. We'd love to hear from you also at Soundproofist. Just send us a note through our website ...and see you next time.