Sir, – Fintan O’Toole contends that Fine Gael believes in a small state (Opinion & Analysis, March 27th). Yet in 2011 we had 301,572 public servants, and by the end of 2022 this had increased to 377,311.
Farmers in Ireland and across Europe are being crushed by an overwhelming weight of paperwork and irrational rules which increasingly have no relevance to solving climate change and are taking all the joy out of producing food.
This crush of paperwork isn’t only affecting farmers, as even public servants like gardaí and teachers complain of too much paperwork as well. This crush of paperwork has strangled our planning process and forestry sector so that it has become a nightmare to build homes or plant trees.
As an example, last December the DAA submitted a planning application to increase passenger numbers at Dublin Airport to 40 million. The application has 7,000 pages and almost 700 images.
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Although the DAA created the application on a computer, it had to be printed to be submitted to the council, which scanned it all back into another computer to publish it on the internet.
Creating a big state isn’t a problem for Fine Gael, but creating an efficient state that gets anything done is. – Yours, etc, JASON FITZHARRIS,
Swords,
Co Dublin.