Sir, – Mark Hennessy reminds us that for 30 years Germans have been paying a “solidarity surcharge” on their tax bills to pay for unification (“Can’t agree on the potential cost of a united Ireland? The Germans may have the answer”, Analysis, April 5th).
His piece was prompted by the International and European Affairs report on the potential €20 billion a year cost of Irish reunification (”Irish unity could cost €20 billion a year for 20 years, study finds, News, April 4th).
It is already Sinn Féin policy to impose a “solidarity tax” on high earners pre-unification – presumably on the basis that those who already pay the bulk of the income tax take are not showing sufficient solidarity.
That being the case, one wonders what catchy label they will attach to the huge increase in taxes which will be required to keep our Northern brethren in the style to which we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed.
Levelling down, anyone? – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.
A chara, – Similarities are being pointed out between Irish reunification and that of Germany, in particular in relation to the enormous financial cost of the latter.
I lived in Germany during the period 1989 to 1992 and was a frequent visitor to East Germany both before and after the Berlin Wall fell.
The differences economically, infrastructurally and socially between the two parts of Ireland pale into insignificance compared to the two parts of Germany.
It was possible to tell immediately if you were in East as opposed to West Germany by everything from the poor-quality clothes people wore ,to the Trabant cars spewing out plumes of blue smoke, to the general state of disrepair of buildings and a pervading sense of quiet resignation in the face of seemingly irreversible decline and decay.
Such stark contrasts in everyday life between, say, Kildare and Antrim simply do not exist.
With German reunification, East German industry suddenly faced open competition from west European companies. It was decades behind in terms of innovation and work practices and was wiped out within a few years.
One example I encountered was a dairy in Torgau near Leipzig. It was the main employer in the town. The locals were delighted when it was bought, for a pittance, by a large West German dairy. They thought their jobs were saved but the new owners closed down operations and made everybody redundant. They only wanted access to the contracted milk suppliers in order to service spare capacity in their West German plants.
Similar catastrophic events across all sectors were commonplace.
Every single aspect of society from the antiquated telephone network to the overarching system of state control, which extended to controlling people’s thoughts and actions and in many instances the destruction of their lives by the infamous state security service (Stasi), had to be dismantled and in many cases a start made from scratch.
None of this will happen in the event of Irish reunification.
Overcoming the challenges facing Irish reunification will not require anything like the per-capita investment or timeframe seen in Germany. – Is mise,
DAVE SLATER,
Kilkea,
Co Kildare.
Sir, – Sinn Féin, other republicans, and many public commentators were quick to dismiss the report authored by John FitzGerald and Edgar Morgenroth, two well-known and established academic economists. The report establishes a likely annual cost of circa €20 billion a year to fund the Northern Ireland subvention in a unification of Ireland. I spent considerable time studying and challenging the details and assumptions in the report, yet found it to be not only informative, but highly credible.
To those attempting to dismiss it, I urge a careful reading of the report with a non-political perspective, if indeed that is possible.
One thing is perfectly clear, unifying Ireland would cost the citizens of this Republic a seriously large amount of money. – Yours, etc,
MARK MOHAN,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15.