Letter in today’s Irish Times.
This is a letter from a man who has been betrayed by our corrupt political system.
The key question he asks is:
Why should I go on being an honest taxpayer…to pay for the mistakes of corrupt politicians, greedy bankers and golden circles who scammed us since so-called independence?
How this question is answered will decide whether Irish citizens get a new republic free from corrupt gombeen politicians or sink ever deeper into poverty and despair.
Sir,
I filled in the online return for the local property tax on the same day that I received the Revenue’s letter telling me about my liability.
In good faith, I also gave it my bank account details so that it could deduct the amount due “no earlier than 21 July 2013” as stated on the website.
I have just been to my bank account and found that it deducted the property tax immediately.
Why should I go on being an honest taxpayer, coughing up hard-earned money for more than 40 years of my working life, paying every cent (and pingin before the euro) in income tax and PRSI and VAT and Dirt and youth levies and health levies and all the other taxes and levies and deductions, and now this house tax and the water tax next, in order to pay for the mistakes of corrupt politicians, greedy bankers and golden circle who have scammed us since so-called “independence”? Not to mention them putting their grubby fingers into my pension fund and levying that too.
Why? Why? Why?
If ageing, middle-class, quiescent, blameless citizens like me, who have never scammed a penny nor hidden a single nixer from the taxman, can get as deeply angry as I am right now at this final straw, then what hope is there that we can sort out the financial mess?
The very roots of participatory democracy are threatened when people like me finally make up our minds to give up on voting and paying tax and all the other duties that come with citizenship.
We are in perilous times indeed.
Yours, etc,
Tim O’Neill
Dublin 7.
Hi Anthony. An interesting letter indeed. Tim represents the vast majority of householders who feel the same way. He is correct too. The taxes now being asked are unjust and do not benefit the citizenship. My advice to him would have been, ‘DO NOT PAY THE PROPERTY TAX’. That is my advice to everyone. This tax must be boycotted.
Tim also illustrates how democracy has broken down in Ireland, Europe and the US. The needs of the working classes are not being met or respected. Working people in Ireland may rightly feel that there is no party which represents them anymore. Inevitably, Labour, as a reformist party, have been dragged to the right. But there is an alternative, in the form of democratic socialism, which is represented by the Socialist Party; a revolutionary party, committed to changing the system, into a more just, more democratic and more productive one.