SF admits orchestrating bulk of 400 property tax submissions

Sinn Féin has admitted orchestrating the bulk of the 400 submissions which Kerry County Council received from members of the public, calling for the maximum reduction in local property tax.

The submissions were referred to at a meeting to decide the issue on Monday last in which Sinn Féin formally proposed a full 15% reduction on the 2015 tax in Kerry. The motion was defeated overwhelmingly.

Yesterday, one of the Sinn Féin councillors who was behind the effort, said Sinn Féin did nothing under- handed in not revealing it was behind more than 300 of the 405 submissions received by the council from the public.

The submissions were typed up on plain paper and people were asked to sign “during a soft canvass” in Killarney and other towns and were then delivered by hand to the council offices.

However, Killarney councillor Brendan Cronin (Ind), who queried the fact that so many of the submissions were the same, said there had been an attempted “manipulation of the public consultation process” .

Sinn Féin proposed the reduction, and at least one of its five councillors referred to the huge volume of submissions by the public calling for the decrease.

However the motion was overwhelmingly defeated and the Fine Gael proposal to retain the tax at the same level was successful.

“There seems to have been a manipulation of the public consultation process,” Mr Cronin said.

Yesterday, Sinn Féin councillor Damian Quigg, representing South and west Kerry, said the party had nothing to hide.

“They were typed by us... To make it easier for people,” he said.

Asked why Sinn Féin did not use its logo on the sheets it handed out to be signed, Mr Quigg said: “It was a last-ditch decision to get ourselves out there.

“All we were trying to do was get the message out there. We are not hiding anything. We were trying to make people aware.”