Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

In Germany 110 civil servants are working to allegedly reduce the burden of bureaucracy. In the UK, the process cost is almost £27 million. I am conscious of how other countries have approached burden reduction and not yielded the concrete results we all desire. Ireland is lightly regulated compared with other EU member states. The World Bank ranks Ireland eighth out of 178 countries in ease of doing business while the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal ranked it third out of 153 countries in terms of economic freedom .

We need to keep this in perspective. However, the 25% target is ambitious in that context. We have circulated Government with a memorandum and we have asked that a structure managed at principal officer level be established in each Department to liaise with my Department which will be the lead Department in co-ordinating this Government wide endeavour to reach this target. To establish an initial list of the information obligations arising from legislative administrative requirements means going back over all the existing legislation. This is a significant task in itself to establish in particular those administrative requirements relating to business. We are using the month of January 2004 as a base line.

The best course of action would be to share with the Deputies the timeline that has been indicated to me to show how the Department intends to proceed. It will be a three to four-year process in terms of the 25%.

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