A full day to photocopy 14 pages

For those who seek copies of public documents – an unfashionable and beleaguered breed in boom-time Ireland – there was some good news last week. Monica Muller, an environmentalist campaigning against the on-shore Shell refinery at Rossport, was charged €1 a page by Mayo County Council for A4 photocopies of planning documents. Following a complaint to the Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly (pictured), this was massively reduced.

The council stated three elements were relevant in calculating the charge per page: Time (€5.82), Equipment (precisely 7 cent for use of the copier) and Paper (7 cent). The council estimates it takes 30 minutes to "retrieve, file separate, photocopy, file re-assemble and re-file" each page. The Ombudsman noted this implied that a clerical officer would "only be able to copy 14 pages in a full day – based on a 7-hour day – and do no other work".

The clerical officer would spend ten minutes retrieving, ten minutes photocopying a page and another ten minutes recovering before searching for the next page. The Council was happy to round the sum up to an even €6 – the actual cost, we now know, to Mayo County Council of copying a page.

It then decided that this sum, described as the economic cost, needed to be checked to see if it was reasonable. A comparison with the analogous fees in Roscommon (€1), Sligo (€1) and Galway (15 cent) county councils then led Mayo to reduce the fee to €1 per A4 page – the reasonable cost. The Ombudsman still was not happy. She asked the County Council to review its charges, since in planning cases only time spent photocopying – not administration – is chargeable.

Furthermore, the Ombudsman considered it would take at most one minute to photocopy a page. The "reasonable" cost was reduced by 90 per cent. The estimated actual or "economic" cost was reduced by 98.5 per cent. Ten cent per page is what county councils can get away with.

Michael Smith