Families are to hold a protest march over the Commission on Taxation’s proposal to tax child benefit on Saturday, Setptember 19th.
The march is being organised by the Protest Against Child Unfriendly Budget (PACUB) and Alliance Against Cuts groups and will start from Parnell Square North in Dublin at 1pm.
PACUB is a voluntary group of parents who say families are being unfairly targeted by the abolition of the early childcare supplement, the proposal to implement a flat rate cut to child benefit and now the recommendation to tax it.
More than 6,300 people have signed an online petition in protest at any cut to child benefit while 5,500 have submitted written protests. 3,500 people have joined the group’s Facebook page.
“Faced with lower incomes or unemployment, tax increases and negative equity, many families are holding on by a thread,” said PACUB spokesperson, Carol Murphy Haslam.
“They now rely on child benefit to put food on the table and for some it is the only income they have.“
Meanwhile, the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) is to hold a public meeting tomorrow evening to discuss the cuts which they say are an attack on women’s rights.
The organisation claims that recommendations in the McCarthy report and in the Commission on Taxation’s report “will dismantle rights for which Irish women have struggled for generations.”
“These cutbacks proposed in the McCarthy report, along with others which pre-dated it, would push women out of the workforce and into welfare dependency and poverty; would lead to the scaling down or closure of women’s groups which provide vital services; and would halt progress towards equality for women,” it said in a statement this morning.
Speaking ahead of tomorrow night’s public meeting, NWCI director Susan McKay said women were still largely excluded from the positions of power in Irish society.
"Now we are being excluded from decisions about public expenditure and taxation which will have devastating effects on us, on our organisations and on the communities in which we work.”
"We have called a public meeting in Dublin tomorrow at 7.30pm so that we can demand that women’s voices are listened to in debates about how our country can recover from the current economic crisis. We refuse to allow the men who run this country to tell us that equality will have to wait. What women are saying is 'no going back,'" she said.