it seems to me that the US is the only country where private flying is officially viewed as anything but a serious nuisance.
In Australia they have a Private-IR, which is a sort of modular IR designed for private pilots and broken into bite-size chunks, so you get your basic then add modules per approach type you want to fly. It would be interesting to hear from some pilots based in Aus how well this works in practice? I suspect that the US model would be preferable from our (pilot's)point of view, but perhaps this Australian P-IR model would be more palatable to our new Euro-regulators?
Andy