A round-up of other conference stories, in brief ...
Jail for TV licence spongers to end
People will no longer be jailed for non-payment of their television licence Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan has announced.
“Last year 54 people went to prison for not paying their TV licence fee. It costs €90,000 for each prison place each year,” he said.
“I don’t think we should be putting people in jail for non-payment of a licence fee”.
He added that he would be making this change in the Broadcasting Bill, which is before the Dáil.
Last year An Post began prosecutions against 14,000 people who failed to pay the €160 fee. In the past five years 220 were jailed for non-payment of the licence.
Proposal to tax texts criticised
A proposal by deputy leader Mary White to put a 1 cent tax on every mobile phone text message was criticised at the party’s national conference in Wexford, for “hitting the less well off”.
Cllr Tony McDermott (Terenure/Rathfarnham, Dublin) said “texting is an important method of communication and provides many positive functions, particularly for the young and the vulnerable.
“Putting a tax on texts would hit the less well of because high-end phones have internet-based ‘instant messaging’ and people who use more expensive phones would escape the tax. Technology that connects people and improves communication must be encouraged.”
About 25 million text messages are sent by Irish mobile phone users daily, which would generate €91 million in tax revenue annually.
Return of domestic rates advocated
A new form of domestic rates based solely on land or site value should be introduced, according to Lucan local election candidate Claire Wheeler.
She also called for the introduction of volume-based water charges.
Ms Wheeler said that “all over Europe and the United States there are property taxes based on land values. This leads to the rational development of land not urban sprawl.”
She asked: “Why shouldn’t the person living in Killiney Hill pay something for the privilege?”
Expressing her staunch opposition to the privatisation of water services, she said every “adult, child and baby” should be allowed a “fair and adequate amount” of water free and “extra consumption would be charged at a level to remind people to conserve water.”
Support for FF policies condemned
The Greens in Government were criticised for behaving like a bullied schoolboy in accepting the “most vicious cuts in our education system”.
Kevin Farrell (Dublin Mid-West) said the party had failed to resist “Fianna Fáil’s partiality for slash and burn”.
Insisting that the cuts had to be reversed he asked if in the future the Green Party would be known as “collaborators in the systematic destruction of the education system or we will be known as the party who pulled the nation back from the brink and laid the foundations for a secure and prosperous future”.