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I'm going to play devil's advocate: the EU's mission was to bring peace. Maybe 80,000 employees producing garbage is a small price to pay for piece.

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Agreed. The EU institutions are remarkably efficient compared to their national equivalents. 80,000 civil servants is a tiny number for a polity of 450 million people. Ireland for example has 50,000 for a population of 1/10th the size.

Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.

Those 50k Irish bureaucrats exist in that number because the organizations they work for are tasked with, among other things, ensuring compliance with rules written in Brussels.

Where are you getting your Irish numbers from?

This source [0] suggests around 300k if we count everything.

It looks like you are just counting the core "civil" servants and defence maybe?

[0] https://publicjobs.ie/en/information-hub?view=article&id=247...

Irish Times: "More than 50,000 staff now employed in Civil Service "

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/04/15/more-than-5000...

Thanks! Interesting that the answer to the PQ doesn't map to the official data (not surprising, but interesting).

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