Sir, – Irish people can’t have it both ways, moaning about lack of services or access to the housing market or refusing to pay proper water charges or property rates like a grown-up country, then refusing to let go of any asset wealth to even-out opportunity for the coming generations.
Is it too much to ask for politicians and policy designers to look beyond the UK and US and learn from other countries that do things better and still manage to have a fully functioning capitalist economic model, rich people, proper housing and fairness, and the where the sky doesn’t fall in?
The Irish economic model is not sustainable and sooner or later the bubble will burst, as it did in 2008, only this time the impact is likely to be even worse as those who have squirrelled away massive unearned wealth since 2008 at the expense of wider society and younger generations are likely to face a day of reckoning from a new Sinn Féin government, if not something worse.
Every rentier economy in history has collapsed in on itself, resulting in massive social upheaval, and the current Irish rentier model is no different. – Yours, etc,
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DESMOND
FITZGERALD,
London.
Sir, – Inheritance tax isn’t unfair. Letting some people receive money tax free just for being born to the right people while others pay up to 50 per cent tax on money they worked hard for is unfair.
And before anyone says it, of course I don’t want any such reforms to happen before it affects me or my children! – Yours, etc,
PETER O’ROURKE,
Ballincollig,
Cork.