Playing with fire as arbitrary costs and red tape

IS IT just me that has a feeling of déjà vu at the moment? Traffic getting worse in the mornings, the lines of builders queuing for breakfast rolls in the Spar, spiralling rents, and the resumption of pay negotiations.

All great if you happen to be construction, IT or a public service job. For the rest of us, it’s a resumption of escalating prices and arbitrary costs.

A few weeks ago I was getting some fields ready for sowing. During the early spring we had cleared out a couple of ditches and cut back overgrown hedges, resulting in a couple of mounds of branches and stumps that needed burning.

Of course it wasn’t until after March that they were all dried out nicely to put a match to, but you dare not light a fire these days for fear of six fire brigades suddenly landing in your field with the attendant bills for €500/hr per engine.

So I rang the local fire station to let them know my plans. I was told I’d need to first apply for a green waste burning permit with the council, and then if we could give the lads in the station a ring anyway “because they often forget to tell us”.

Then I got on to Meath County Council to look for a permit.

“That’ll be €25,” said the otherwise lovely official. For what? “Admin.” And is this standard across all counties now I asked slightly stunned. “Yep, that’s the way it is now,” was the response.

The hack in me wasn’t convinced and I duly rang up another random county — Longford in this case. Lo and behold, the equally lovely woman informed me that would be no charge for a permit to burn agricultural waste.

It reminded me of one of the old reliables that an editor used to get me to do when news was scarce.

“Ring around those councils and find out what they are charging for fire brigades,” or “let’s do a survey of water charges on a county by county basis”.

They were always surefire stories simply because the huge variation and apparently arbitrary way that costs are charged by various local authorities, especially when we got into the madness of the boom.

You might not mind as much if the higher charges were related to a better service, but as I was about to find out, the ‘admin’ is often a joke.

The permit asks you to specify a date and exact location that you are going to burn, which is plainly daft given that it takes days for the permit to be issued and you can’t be sure if weather conditions will allow a fire to be set in a week’s time.

That aside, I wasn’t going to be forking out multiples of €25 for every field in which I wanted to burn, even if they were in different locations.

In addition to the requirement to “limit the overall nuisance or possibilities of endangering human health or causing environmental pollution or damage to habitats”, the notice required me to contact the Emergency Response Control Centre to tell them that I was going to burn.

And there was me thinking that it was exactly this kind of ‘admin’ that my €25 was covering.

So we rang the Emergency Response Control Centre — twice — only to be told that they hadn’t received any email from the county council about the details. Bear in mind that this was almost a week after I had emailed off the original application.

We were in danger of missing our specified date for burning because some official hadn’t got around to pressing ‘send’ on an email that I’d paid them €25 to do.

It’s this kind of stuff that drives small businesses around the twist. After all,