Madam, – I agree with Garret FitzGerald’s comments on the Government’s tax policy (Opinion, February 14th).
That Ireland has one of the lowest income tax rates in Europe makes no sense in terms of our economic structure, industrial base and population. The income tax reductions of the past decade were funded by massive but temporary tax revenues from the construction and motoring sectors, which have now greatly reduced. These windfall revenues should have been invested in capital programmes and not used to fund outrageous current expenditure increases and income tax reductions. These were shortsighted and unsustainable.
The Government now finds itself with an ever-increasing current deficit and has spent the past few months trying to address this when the solution is blatantly obvious. Income tax rates must be increased significantly. There is really no viable option. If we want top-class health, education and other public services, then we are going to have to pay up!
The Government’s assertion that income tax rates would stifle consumer spending carries little weight in the present situation. It is more likely that spending is being stifled by consumer uncertainty, compounded by a Government which does not seem to have a clear recovery plan and is unable or unwilling to make correct and timely economic decisions. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I am simply perplexed as to how we citizens can tolerate the continued occupation of the office of Taoiseach by Brian Cowen.
In his previous role as Minister for Finance he contributed enormously to our current economic woes of this country. He blindly presided over a regime that continued to feed the property boom with tax concessions and incentives and to reap the short-term revenue inflows from inflated property transactions.
This flood of money was squandered recklessly through the completely unjustified explosion in the numbers recruited to the public service, in spite of promises to reform it. Mr Cowen also facilitated the insane benchmarking of public servants’ pay and as Minister for Finance failed to adequately explain the real value of the public service pension scheme to its members and of course its catastrophic cost to taxpayers.
As Taoiseach, he wasted valuable time in talks with the “social partners” last August and September to negotiate a ridiculous pay agreement which made no sense in a dramatically collapsing economy. To compound this appalling lack of judgment, Mr Cowen included the “social partners” once more in private talks on the public finances in January, to the exclusion of elected politicians.
The economic horrors that lie around the corner are a truly frightening prospect. The wasted months since September are down to the bungling and ineffective actions of a man who has no capacity to lead the Government decisively. Mr Cowen gets a tick in all the wrong boxes on my scorecard. He should go now. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Anne-Marie Hourihane (Opinion, February 16th), referring to public-sector workers, says that “their job security was – and is – total”. It isn’t.
Sorry to puncture the myth of public-sector permanency, but hundreds (perhaps thousands) of temporary local authority work- ers, for example, have already lost their jobs. Furthermore, many more temporary public-sector workers, such as teachers and special needs assistants, will begin paying the new pensions levy next month before losing their jobs in June.
Rather than worrying about families divided by public/private divisions, as Ms Hourihane suggests, I’m sure Mr Cowen is delighted by the success of his “divide and conquer” policy. As your other columnist Sarah Carey said last week, we should be angered by the true division in this country, between the very highly paid and the rest of us. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Just as the Minister for Finance correctly believed that the resignation of the Irish Life Permanent CEO was an important step in restoring confidence in the banking sector, so too would the resignation of this Government and the calling of a general election be an important first step in restoring confidence, both domestic and international, in the Irish economy. What is at stake here is the very solvency of the Irish State.
Internationally, our economy and Government are now rated as the most damaged and risky in the euro zone. This means we will pay hundreds of millions more in interest payments compared with our European partners, exacerbating the state of Government finances and ultimately increasing the tax burden on each household. This is the cost of Fianna Fáil and Green Party incompetence and procrastination.
Domestically, the Government has lost all moral and political authority. There is real anger among people who are coping with effects of the obvious policy and regulatory failures. It is important that politics, in the form of a general election, lances this anger. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – If Bank of Ireland chief executive Brian Goggin took a pay cut of 99 per cent he would still make more than the average industrial wage of €28,000 a year and almost twice as much as the minimum-paid worker, who makes €8.65 an hour. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – JM Keynes put it nicely when he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The facts and the situation in which Ireland finds itself are materially changed since the present Government was mandated at the last election. The action and inaction of incumbent ministers and their respective departments has been rated and ranked by our international peers.
Ireland, with a low-tax economy, good demographics and an educated workforce, attracted sizeable foreign direct investment, kick-starting the boom. The second leg of the “miracle” was built on access to artificially low interest rates over a prolonged period, something totally outside our Central Bank’s control.
However, it is very clear now that an over-reliance on property, spurred on with unnecessary tax breaks, led to massive over-gearing, in turn leading to artificially buoyed tax budgets and promises of nirvana for all.
In the boom times, what did we really achieve as a nation? State-of-the-art hospitals with easy access to care for all, especially the more vulnerable? No.
Infrastructural development? Some, but given the size of our country, and what was spent, was it enough? No.
Improvements in education? The crumbling schools, the reductions in budgets for the most vulnerable children answer the question.
New regulatory policies? Just over-funded and under-worked regulatory authorities.
If all this is not this Government’s responsibility, then whose is it? Those in charge who failed to invest during the good times with counter-cyclical tax policies, have had their chance and are clearly not the people to lead us out of recession. Hard decisions taken when we were cash-rich could have spared a lot of the pain we’re now experiencing. A minister not making it his business to know, cover to cover, a report which he himself ordered is inexcusable, 720 pages or not.
We must now recognise the problems facing us and decide who is best placed to start repairing the damage that has been done. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Brian Foley’s suggestion (February 14th) that we ask the UK to “take us back” may have merit, but is a bit late. Independence was arguably a mistake, but the saying, “As you make your bed, so must you lie in it”, comes to mind.
John Redmond wanted us to stay in the UK. By leaving, we lost a material benefactor. Redmond’s achievements amounted to a “social revolution”, in the words of the professor for modern history in Trinity College, Dublin. Redmond and chief secretary Augustine Birrell made Ireland both democratic and prosperous. “The British presence in Ireland, however unpopular in principle, came to be widely tolerated as a practical source of employment and material benefit,” in Prof David Fitzpatrick’s words.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland benefited from the UK welfare state and richer employment opportunities. Through an almost ritualistic disintegration of morality and integrity in our financial and some of our political circles, we have indeed made a failure of this republic. It has reached a state of near economic collapse and has lost international credibility. The safety valve of emigration has been shut off; and when we rejected the minor constitutional changes of the Lisbon Treaty, we signalled a lack of appreciation of the great riches the EU brought us, and of the EU itself.
In such circumstances, would “our dear neighbours across the water” take us back? As George Bernard Shaw said, England dropped us “like a hot potato”. Has that potato become hotter since independence? – Yours, etc,
Madam, - I completed my secondary education in 1987 and entered the workforce directly. Because I stayed in Ireland I have enjoyed a great many of the improvements in our society in the intervening 22 years, including the wonderful experience of working in the office of the “poet in cabinet” in the mid-1909s.
Sadly, the series of e-mails printed in your Opinion Analysis pages last Friday merely mirror the unhelpful dominance of vocal commentators, both paid and unpaid, blaming all the usual suspects for the country’s woes — real and exaggerated. In truth, we have almost all contributed in some way, by the choices we made, to both the improvements and the challenges the country is experiencing. The question now is what contribution will each of us make to meeting these challenges and further improving our quality of life.
We are, after all, a republic – we have government of the people by the people and for the people. Perhaps when we start, individually and collectively, to act as good republicans we will enjoy an even more just and open society. In the meantime, I’m grateful that things have gone as well as they have for as long as they have.
I have no qualms about contributing to a pension that will assist me when I retire in the city and country that I love. – Yours, etc,