Huge padding on items?

Ionic Framework ionic-v3
1

I am trying to create a slim footer toolbar but something keeps adding heaps of padding. To experiment I have gone through adding styling for 0px padding to everything I can see and I still have these huge gutters I cannot seem to get rid of.

Left and right padding is ok, it spaces items out nicely but it’s the top and bottom padding that I need to be able to adjust as the huge gutters look odd and make the footer/toolbar take way too much space on the screen.

I have created a plunker here to show what I mean:

Any suggestions on what I am doing horribly wrong and missing would be greatly appreciated.

2

I have updated the plunker with the solution I found to be able to still use an ion-item in a footer without picking up huge amounts of padding. Not sure that it’s a “good” solution but it does seem to work