This article is from page 28 of the 2005-08-30 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 28 JPG
A STARTLING new survey shows that the majority of women have no personal life insurance – although it would cost more than €37,000 a year to pay someone else just to do the work they do in the home.
Of the women quizzed for the Ark Life Insurance survey, 57 per cent said they had no personal life insur- ance, although almost half of those asked said they contributed to the household budget by working in paid employment.
Forty six per cent of those asked
said their partners had no life cover on them, while four in ten women’s partners had no life cover for them- Noone litle
Ark Life, AIB’s Life and Pensions Company, which commissions the annual survey from Behaviour and Attitudes Market Research, said that the results show that many families would be left financially vulnerable if the female partner died unexpect- edly.
The number of uninsured women is up 4 per cent on last year, based on 400 women interviewed for the SUA
The survey found that when asked to specify the hours they worked in the home, women worked on average 17 hours a day looking after the chil- dren, cooking, cleaning, laundry and looking after the home.
To pay for that work, based on the current minimum wage of €7.65 per hour, would cost €780 a week or over €37,000 annually, based on a six- day working week, the researchers involved in the survey discovered.
In addition, the research revealed that the majority of women working outside the home (63 per cent) are not provided with a lump sum death
benefit by their employer and in 43 per cent of cases, the partner’s em- ployer did not provide a lump sum benefit either.
“It must be of concern that such a high proportion of women do not have life assurance cover. Those that do have very modest cover – the median value is just over €62,000. This is despite the fact that 38 per cent of women believe that the lump sum needed in the event of their own death would be €100,000”,, said Ber- nard Lynch, Marketing Manager, Ark Life.
A NORTH CLARE group which set up it’s own broadband scheme have been so suc- cessful that next month, residents and busi- nesses in Liscannor and Lahinch plan to sign up bringing to 200 or more the number of subscribers.
The North West Clare Broadband group was born out of the disinterest of the big providers in extending the scheme to an area which would not initially have large numbers of subscribers. A number of En- nistymon locals decided to investigate go- ing it alone in the broadband stakes after they were told by Eircom that they would have to have a minimum of 394 connections and even then, the area would have to wait 18 months for the facility.
Locals came together and sent representa- tives to meet with several other large service providers, but could raise no enthusiasm for providing the service to around 60 potential subscribers.
So instead, they went about raising the in- vestment to link into the AI Bridges-built link to Smart Telecom’s cable network in Shannon.
They were helped along by a small Gov- ernment Grant from the Group Broadband Scheme.(GBS)
The GBS provided 30 per cent of the first year capital cost and less than 20 per cent of the cost of setting up the network in effect.
The group is run as a co-operative on a non-profit basis and, a spokesman said, this enables them to “be in charge of ourselves. We can put money back into the company. It just results in a better product for every-
body.”
Now the network has been up and run- ning for six months and users report that the smaller numbers mean the service is under less pressure than in urban areas.
Their next step is to sign up nearby towns and villages and this is expected to happen in a matter of weeks.