Over-Zealous Enforcement of Regulations in Ireland
By Bock Mar 4th, 2010 | | Category: Society
If you were the proverbial Martian observing this country, you might be tempted to think that we in Ireland don’t enforce laws and regulations at all. You might be inclined to believe that our laid-back chilled attitude makes us the Jamaica of the north, and that we’re all nice and relaxed about those pesky rules.
But you’d be wrong.
When it comes to rules and regulations, we have a two-pronged approach.
We don’t bother to enforce the important stuff, but we put all our energy into enforcing the trivial.
For example, our financial regulator doesn’t waste his time watching the bankers whose activities are about to crash the economy. He’s too busy playing golf with them.
We don’t arrest bankers for their criminal activities.
Our energy regulator does nothing about a corrupt government minister signing over a huge deposit of natural gas to a foreign corporation with no apparent payment to the country in return.
And our government has no difficulty handing over a billion euros to cover the costs of the child-abusing clergy while simultaneously paying another billion to provide them with control of the children’s hospital.
In Ireland’s topsy-turvy world, those are the small things, while the important things involve harassment of small businesses, and meaningless pen pushing.
You’ll possibly have noticed two posts here in recent days. One was about a HSA inspector instructing a mechanic to remove a topless calendar from his workshop, and the other was about a middle-management Garda roaming the streets raiding quiet, peaceful pubs when his highly-paid skills might have been applied to fighting real crime. A middle-management Garda who sees his role as wandering around at night would make you ask what sort of management structures they have in that force, if any.
Did this raid achieve anything? Yes. It alienated the police from the very people whose support they need: the quiet, law-abiding community they’re supposed to be protecting.
This is normal in Ireland-world.
A few years ago, there was a lovely little restaurant in Limerick called the Milk Bar. It was small, cosy and friendly, with a high-quality and varied menu.
The health inspectors closed it.
Was it dirty? No.
Was it dangerous? No.
Was the chef serving cooked cats and seagulls? No.
The reason the health service closed it was because the kitchen was too small.
Some jobsworth, reading from a list of requirements in some manual, decided this was sufficient reason to put people out of work and deprive the town of a high-quality restaurant.
What did this achieve?
Nothing.
Who or what were they protecting? I don’t know, and I doubt if they know. These people are not in the business of rational thinking. It’s widely believed in the catering trade that even if you win an argument with the local health inspectors, they’ll come back and get you for something else to teach you a lesson.
Would such officious nonsense be tolerated in France, or German or Italy?
Not for one second, but here in Ireland, they talk about EU regulations as if the EU was a place far away from us. A place where suspicious eyes are watching Ireland like a hawk in case we make one slip.
Another time, I was visiting friends in Donegal, one of whom runs his own pub. During a break in our weekend-long carousing, we went to the local Chinese restaurant for someting to eat and I said I’d like to try the sizzling platter.
You can’t, said my pub-owning friend.
Why not?
They banned them. The health inspectors decided that a child might possibly get a burn from the hot plate, so they banned them.
Where?
Everywhere in Donegal.
You see, that’s the Irish regulatory approach to petty matters. It would have taken something too much like effort for the inspector to figure out a solution, and something too much like intelligence to use a bit of common sense, so the easy answer was simply to ban the source of their anxiety.
We love to over-react.
We destroyed all our nice old-fashioned pubs in the aftermath of the Stardust tragedy, forcing them to rip out all their lovely timber features, in case a fire might somehow rip through them and kill all the customers. We put EXIT signs in tiny one-room bars and restaurants in case you forgot that you came in through that door over there the same as you do every night. This was despite the fact that, unlike in the Stardust where the fire went unnoticed until it was too late, most of our pubs were so small that a blind man could see a fire starting, and stamp it out before it went anywhere.
Why is this? What were we afraid of? Did these fire regulations reduce loss of life by a single person?
No, because in Ireland, most people who die in fires do so in their beds.
What we were really trying to avoid was not the loss of life, but the danger of too many people dying together at the same time, because this upsets us. We’re content with fifty people dying horribly at different times and in different places, but we will not tolerate them dying horribly together.
Everywhere I look, there’s a petty, non-thinking official trying to restrict my movements, my actions and my freedoms, without any clear reason for it, and this enrages me because I see millionaires and billionaires, and crooked politicians, entirely unburdened by rules, and unmolested by officials — petty or otherwise — asking them to account for their actions.
You’ve just reminded me that I have to write a letter for my child minder to give to the HSE, telling them that my 3 year old son wont eat hot food, so the child minder cannot comply with their requirement to give him two hot meals a day. Jobsworths is right Bock, and they are in overdrive at the moment to justify their jobs, in places like the HSE anyway. FREEDOM is a little appreciated concept sometimes. If I think my childminder needs a stainless steel kitchen to prepare my kiddies food, then I will seek a childminder with such a kitchen. I wont however, as food is prepared at home without the benefit of any stainless steel, and we’ve kept them out of hospital.
Crazy. Yesterday I saw another small example of it in action.
You know that awful fuckup of a new traffic system they have at Sexton street, where they have basically routed all of the traffic going into Town past the two schools there, and left a huge big walled off island in the centre of it all doing nothing but taking up space?
Well, as a result of that, there is virtually nowhere left for parents to park so they can pick up their kids from said schools.
I was off work yesterday so I drew kid collecting duty. As I was waiting at the traffic lights to take the left turn up to the school, I saw a traffic warden standing there. Just standing there, out of sight around the corner form the school. I was stuck at the lights for a good 5 minutes and he didn’t move. At exactly 14:40 (school’s out time) he legged it around the corner and started writing tickets for every single person who was parking around the school to pick up their kids. Must have written 5 tickets in as many minutes, literally as the cars were pulling in, he was writing them up.
Instead of going down-town where the real problem is, with people double and even treble parked on that street leading up the train station, and on many of the smaller streets, double parked on corners and even on the main street, against the flow of traffic in many cases. no, better to target mums picking up their kids.
A number of years ago my kids were in a childminders which was attached to the family home. The owners mother was a regular feature in all the kids lives and was referred to as Nanna Mary. Nanna Mary cooked for the kids everyday, good wholesome home cooked food like stew, cottage pie, bacon & cabbage. Then along came some cunt from the food authority and said to Nanna Mary “no more cooking” So Nanna Mary who cooked for her own family and all the kids and to my knowledge never killed anyone had to buy in food from a local cafe to feed the kids. This food was transported about a mile by car and doled out, this was deemed preferable to home cooking. These wankers struggle to justify their existence hence the pettiness. I could go on but am exasperated.
Gone are the good olds days when the health inspector only acted like that until they were handed their brown envelopes. Now it seems that they act this way as a job requirement, no bribe need or wanted.
It’s like machine thinking. And only a step away from machine programming.
No.8′s story about Nanny Mary illustrates nicely the effect of Nanny State. Now that childminders is obliged to incur an extra cost which they will then have to pass on to the parents, as if childminding wasn’t expeensive enoug. So as well as having to pay for these superfluous cunts salaries through tax money, but also they are costing both Irish businesses (pub/garage/child-minder) and the average Irish citizen more expense of time energy, time and money.
Bah,
I’m sick of it all,
The regulations where you can and can’t cook.
Their regulations where you can and can’t drink.
Their regulations when you can and can’t drink.
Their regulations when you can and can’t eat.
Their regulations when and where you can and can’t listen to a live band or just dance at a disco.
We’ve allowed a crowd of incomeptent ninnies to dictate all of the above to us driven at the heart of it by a corrupt immoral institution behind the almost as immoral government front to it.
Christ we don’t do things by halves. From being one of the most unsafe countries to work in the construction industry we created an industry from health and safety whereby you can’t fart without filling in about 64 pages of forms and having convinced everyone that you have read the instruction manual how to do it without hurting yourself or anyone else (In triplicate as well).
Now you have to have completed a special course to be allowed to put traffic cones on a road to stop someone from driving into a fucking pothole (I kid you not).
YET on the other hand you can have a diploma in public administration or maybe geography, go to Dublin for twelve months and return as a town and urban planner and dictate to fully trained and expert architects or engineers regarding the style of a house that can be built, how it should be built and what part of the local flood plain they should be built on. They can’t deviate from the county guide book on house design because they have never been trained in Architecture or basic construction engineering ie. what can and can’t be physically built.
Muppets, each and everyone. but of all of a sudden we don’t need them anymore because theres fuckall happening, I reckon tis time to give them the road.
Start with the HSE guys and gals and drop those who have never worked in the industry, move onto the planners and don’t take on any more on unless they have an architectural or Engineerin background. Move onto the administrators and hack out the dead wood that have been there since they were in school and only replace all of the above (when things pick up) with people who have spent some time working outside the cocoon of the Public Service in the real world of the industries they are attempting to regulate.
If you haven’t done it then you don’t know it, and don’t try to tell the rest of us how it should be done unless you actually have tried.
This thread has certainly attracted a lot of posts.
I can see it running for a good while.
I was going to leave a comment but I have to complete a short course first.
My old mother occasionally worries about “China taking over the world” (and she also wonders aloud “What do mongoloids from Mongolia look like”…), but having spent a few years in Asia, I think that should be the least of her worries. Even in squeaky clean Singapore, you have food stalls everywhere, a mega-casino and the semi-legal “four floors of whores”.
We Irish need a good slap in the national gob.
Be careful HQ, remember you have to taek a break from looking at your screen for at least 5 minutes every hour otherwise the H & S stasi will come and take your machine away.
For your own safety like.
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Makework for fuckwits to justify their existence, inflated wages and platinum pensions morelike.
Surely its time to shackle the AUTHOROCRATS who are ruining our country.
Bock I thought I had invented a new word this morning. It is this useless shower of authorocrat fuckers that drag down the good name of those decent hard working public servants. Power has driven these bastards mad altogether. Lok at the HSE and their antics this morning trying to gag Alan Shatter, instead of addressing the patent incompetence of their own staff.
Why haven’t the H&S shut down the rat infested schools, and made the government fix them up before allowing them to reopen?
I think there’s more to it than just the makework thing though. Ordinary butchers who used to have their own little abbatoirs have been driven out of business the length and breadth of the country over the last 20 years or so. The ostensible reason was food safety, you know, “not our fault its the EU” that kind of thing, and yet small artisan operators have no such problems in France and elsewhere. I’m convinced this is down to the big meat plants using their influence (we know who their friends are from the Beef Tribunal) to impose massive costs which they know the little guy can’t afford. I believe Health and Safety generally is widely used to restrict compettition and keep little guys out of the market. Alternative explanations are laughably implausible when you consider how lax regulation is when it comes to financial services and other areas.
Shoot the bastards……. The thought police haven taken over the land, It used to be the church now its these over paid civil service cunts. They have fuck all to do it seems but reign red tape terror across the land fascist scum.
Good one Mel Authorocrats…….. What about Parasitocrats or Bastardocrats
Hangar Queen
10 out of 10.
Get used to it folks this is all part of a greater EU plan to control everything you do in your lives.
Did you see in the UK where the Fire-service stood by for 6 hours doing nothing while a young woman died in a mine shaft. The reason they refused to take action were given as “Health & Safety concerns”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7047101.ece
Authorocrats, Parasitocrats, Bastardocrats…….. typical. How dare you Bock,UB40 and Mel devalue the efforts of the people that run this state. They provide the glue for our society and obviously provide an easy targets for anarchistic moaners and serial whingers like you, who have nothing better to do.
Try making a contribution to society.
I’m starting to smell a troll.
Howard, not condoning what happened in the UK but would you rather mutiple deaths rather than “just” one? The rescue services cannot be expected to put their lives at unreasonable risk to save someone. Sad but true.
Howard, number 15. It is nothing to do with the EU. The EU might have made a directive, regulation, or a decision as to what rules and regulations should be in place, but it is always, in 100% of cases, the national or local administration who decide *how* these regulations are implemeneted.
A perfect example of this was already given in respect to small butchers in Ireland being closed down “because of the EU”, yet in most other countries (except the UK, obviously) they are sensible as to how they implement the rules.
It really pisses me off that Ireland apes the UK in all the bad implementations of rules, regulations, and society, and yet ignore all the good ideas which can be seen all over Europe and other parts of the world.
What the fuck point is that?