CLARE Short is in trouble again. The feisty, generous British Labour MP has been told that she must toe the party line on all matters or else. Ms Short has been reprimanded for suggesting on a television programme recently that people like herself should perhaps pay more in tax.
As an MP she earns £34,000, topped up by handsome expenses. But, following the death of her husband, Alex Lyon, a British Labour Party minister, Ms Short also receives a widow's pension of £20,000 a year. Her offence, it seems, was to wonder publicly whether she could not afford to pay rather more in tax.
I wonder sometimes about cultural conditioning. Ms Short's family comes from Crossmaglen and she is fiercely proud of her Irish upbringing. What might have happened if she had joined the Irish Labour Party and become a minister in the Dail?
Would she now consider it a part of her duties to reprimand the Garda when it tries to enforce the laws against citizens who do not pay the taxes which the State demands from them?
Ms Eithne Fitzgerald, in another illuminating example of the Labour Party's attitudes, has strongly defended the action she took in writing to the Garda Siochana objecting to the treatment of a constituent whose car was confiscated when it was found that road tax had not been paid on it for 18 months.
The Minister has asked the superintendent at Pearse Street station to investigate the seizure of the car and "to consider a more appropriate policy if people are found untaxed in future.
Ms Fitzgerald has also said that she is "outraged" by the fact that her constituent's privacy was invaded by newspaper reports of the case. I have no wish to add to the Minister's sense of "outrage" nor to infringe her constituent's privacy.
But it is worth pointing out that the case was first made public early in February when her constituent gave an interview to the Sunday Independent, accompanied by a large photograph, complaining of the garda's confiscation of her car, of being left to walk home from Mount Street to her home in Stillorgan and that she had been cold and frightened.
I remember reading the story and being rather surprised that anyone would feel they were entitled to sympathy when the law had been broken in this way. As the article in the Sunday Independent made clear, the Garda has a duty to impound a car which is found to be untaxed or uninsured for three months, and in this case road tax had not been paid for 18 months.
A GARDA spokesman made the point that while he regretted that Ms Fitzgerald's constituent probably had a long and cold walk home "there is no need to exaggerate the danger. It was Mount Street, after all, not Harlem".
In fact, the road from the centre of Dublin to Stillorgan is wide and brightly lit. It is well maintained because most motorists pay their road tax.
There is a connection between the payment of taxes and the State's ability to provide services for its citizens, which most of us accept. We pay our taxes, not exactly gladly but willingly, because we value the services the State provides and see this contract as the basis of a civil society.
It might occur to some people that a more proper subject for the superintendent at Pearse Street to investigate was why this car was driven for 18 months without the road tax having been paid, without steps being taken to remedy this state of affairs.
In fact, as further Garda statements have now made clear, successive efforts were made, over several years, to try and enforce the law.
I'm grateful to Veronica Guerin, a reporter with a fine record of letting facts rather than emotion do the talking, for the information that Ms Fitzgerald's constituent was stopped by gardai on several occasions dating back to 1993 and questioned about tax and insurance on her car.
Several attempts were made to bring her to court, and in June 1994 she was convicted of driving without tax and insurance. In February 1995, when she was again questioned about a tax disc being out of date, it transpired that there were unpaid parking tickets amounting to £2,800 relating to the car.
I don't pretend to be above reproach on this issue. Not at all. Most of us take advantage of the notoriously lax enforcement of the road traffic laws, whether it be parking on yellow lines or ignoring the one way signs on suburban streets.
I've made several trips to the pound to pick up my car when it had been illegally parked. Very expensive, very time wasting. Most of all, though, very annoying because, once the initial impotent rage has abated, one knows that the only proper response to the young garda's knowing reproach is: "It's a fair cop, guv.
Ms Fitzgerald's reaction, in this case at least, has been to ask the police "to consider a more appropriate policy [than confiscation] if people are found untaxed in future". What does she mean? And what kind of message is this sending to her own constituents and to the Garda? At the very least it seems to imply that they should "go easy" on people who "are found untaxed".
It's only a small step further to infer that the prompt payment of tax, or indeed the payment of tax at all, should be treated by the police as a relatively minor matter.
THIS letter and the Minister's stout defence of her action seems, to this lifelong Labour voter at least, a deal more disturbing than her recent gaffe about the fund raising letter. That was crass and embarrassing but also almost endearingly naive. No businessman or woman in their right mind would seriously think that a £100 meal ticket would buy access to the Minister for Finance.
Labour ministers may be cheap, but not that cheap.
In this case, though, the suggestion seems to be that the law should be applied, or not applied, to suit the convenience of the individual. Of course, there are times when unjust laws, and even just ones, bear down quite unfairly on the most poor and needy in our society.
But the legal obligation to pay road tax does not fall into that category, at least not in this case. A person who chooses to drive a car has to accept that certain rules apply to what is an expensive privilege and that penalties will be imposed if these rules are not observed.
I've been told, over and over again, that our ambiguous - and often resentful - attitudes to such issues as the payment of tax derive from our experience of a) colonisation; b) the Famine; c) Partition. Let's make the tedious point once again. The Road Traffic Act of 1994 was introduced by a sovereign Irish government, passed by the Oireachtas a full 70 years after independence. We pay an Irish police force to implement these laws. We should let them get on with it.