The Eurocrats are at it again:

http://tinyurl.com/4jdwyr

I am not a betting man, but I'd bet the farm (if I had one) that this is another of those straight banana stories so loved by the tabloids and believed by the knuckle trailing readers of such publications.
Do a Google on Euromyths and you'll see what I mean.

Personally I wouldn't miss them.
However to say that they can't wear earplugs whilst playing is nonsense. Modern earplugs, individually made for the player have no effect on hearing tuning and the like. Many, many (rock)musicians use them all the time, as do sound engineers. Their hearing is too valuable to risk damage. My son, a sound engineer has a few sets.
He does TV coverage of concerts, but also of football matches where the noise levels can also be dangerously high, but he also uses them whilst playing electric guitar with friends.
Youngest son, a drummer, also has a set.

There was a day when I thought bagpipes should be banned.

Herself and I arrived in a hotel in Galway on the evening of St. Patrick's day. We had booked dinner there because we had thought that other restaurants in town might be busy. Having settled into our room, we went down to the dining room, which turned out to be an area separated from the bar by screens. There was a pipe band from Chicago (I think it was the Chicago police, but it might have been the fire department) that had participated in the parade earlier that day, and they had taken over the bar. Four of them were playing the pipes, and the noise was unbearable. The hotel offered us dinner in our room, an offer we accepted with alacrity.

Oh this old chestnut. We had all this about symphony orchestras when the regulations were being discussed.

They don't, of course, do any such thing. What they do do, is to set EU-wide standards for levels of noise at work that require employers to ensure their employees have their hearing monitored and help if it's being damaged.

"Pipe majors claim it is virtually impossible to ... tune a band when the musicians are wearing earplugs."

The only way to get two pipers to play in tune is to shoot one of them.

Anselm

Oh, and the modern style of bagpipes were never designed to be played indoors. Nor, it now seems, were they in the past quite as Victorian Scottish "traditions" would have us believe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/19/scotland

I'm not surprised. I always preferred the "small pipes" like the Northumbrian.

"The only way to get two pipers to play in tune is to shoot one of them."

They say the same thing about piccolo players.

I play the piccolo.

If Brussels really wer5e banning bgagpipes, it'd be the first good argument for the EU in 50 yeats

But "Brussels" isn't banning anything,

Restrictions which might make bagpipe playing difficult have been created by the British Health and Safety Executive - ultimately a tool of the endlessly iuntefering Labour government. The minster responsible (James Purnell) is a Brownite.

The HSE claims its rules follow from an EU agreement. There is no evidence that either the Scot currently mismanaging the British government or his Scottish-educated predecessor opposed the agreement. Or that any other European nation has enacted restrictions as batty as those the British are proposing. Britain, especially since we let the Scots take over, leads Europe by miles in making our enactment of the EU rules our Scottish masters agree to infintely more restrictive than our European partners ever intended.

As almost always, "Brussels bans..." really means "bloody Labour's at it again"

But they've only got a maximum of 700 days left.