Rules and Regulations

vcsggl

How is it that rural Ireland has become so beset with rules and regulations? There are folk telling me when I can and can't cut hedges, have bonfires, spray weeds etc. It's getting more and more difficult to find anywhere to buy turf and then last week had another wonderful example of regulation madness. Went to the Muff Fair last Tuesday - great day although a bit wet underfoot! There was a food tent with a big open fire and a pig roast and big pots of Muff Stew - great stuff for keeping the rain out! Noticed a couple of anorak types with clipboards and notebooks who approached the fire and started looking at the stew pots and then proceeded to check the temperature of the stew - all then written down in their notebooks! Seems like they were from the Health and Safety brigade of Cavan County Council - they were very concerned that the stew wasn't hot enough and started questioning the "cook". As far as I know Muff Fair has been going on for about 400 years and I doubt that there has been any serious problems during that time with folks getting ill from eating Muff Stew. There was a time when the Council busybodys would have ended up in a boghole but apart from a few of the lads suggesting that the pair of them should "fall" into the mud everybody seemed to accept that that is how things are these days. Why is it that a country that for so long had a very healthy scepticism for daft rules and regulations now seems to go quietly along with every new restriction that the bureacrats dream up?

George

irish_bob

vcsggl wrote: »

How is it that rural Ireland has become so beset with rules and regulations? There are folk telling me when I can and can't cut hedges, have bonfires, spray weeds etc. It's getting more and more difficult to find anywhere to buy turf and then last week had another wonderful example of regulation madness. Went to the Muff Fair last Tuesday - great day although a bit wet underfoot! There was a food tent with a big open fire and a pig roast and big pots of Muff Stew - great stuff for keeping the rain out! Noticed a couple of anorak types with clipboards and notebooks who approached the fire and started looking at the stew pots and then proceeded to check the temperature of the stew - all then written down in their notebooks! Seems like they were from the Health and Safety brigade of Cavan County Council - they were very concerned that the stew wasn't hot enough and started questioning the "cook". As far as I know Muff Fair has been going on for about 400 years and I doubt that there has been any serious problems during that time with folks getting ill from eating Muff Stew. There was a time when the Council busybodys would have ended up in a boghole but apart from a few of the lads suggesting that the pair of them should "fall" into the mud everybody seemed to accept that that is how things are these days. Why is it that a country that for so long had a very healthy scepticism for daft rules and regulations now seems to go quietly along with every new restriction that the bureacrats dream up?

George

theese rules and regulations exist primarily to keep civil servants in jobs , be it at county council level or at the dept of agri
one of things i heard from farmers around the time of the lisbon referendum was that the eu was the reason they had to put up with farm inspections etc, i assured them that even if ireland were to do a switzeraland remove ourselves from the eu , farmers would still have to put up with beauracracy , civil servants at the dept of ag have to be kept in jobs so as to keep them voting for the goverment and the unions of the streets and so on

il gatto

People always blame the E.U. here, but from I can see, Italy, Spain, France etc. haven't got the lickspittle civil servants "clamping down" on evrything they can invent an inspector for. People don't die from food poinoning from mouldy cheese, steak tartar and unpasteurised dairy products. This country has become the ultimate nanny state. The enviro nazis have made things very difficult for farmers especially. Can't burn this, can't spread that, can't graze there. Most of it seems to be notional with no regard to the practicalities of implementing it on the ground, other than having inspectors harass honest, hardworking people. In a country where most of our electrity is produced burning fossil fuels and all our (rubbish) public transport runs on fossil fuels, you can't burn vegatation that there is no other practical way of disposing of. They punish the general populace whilst ignoring the inefficient, environmentally unsound nature of state and semi state bodies.