Getting rid of Fianna Fáil is just the first step for betrayed voters

I’VE never begrudged paying taxes — until now. It was a friend and colleague of mine who said that, as she looked at the shipwreck that used to be her pay-slip.

She’s not a highly-paid person, not someone who lives high on the hog. By the time she has paid her mortgage each month, there’s just about enough to get by. And she’s someone who believes strongly in social justice and in fairness, and tries to practice it in her work.

In other words, she’s just like most people I know. And most people I met this past week were similarly shocked by the size of the cuts they received — hundreds of euro a month from already very modest pay packets.

But as my friend said, there’s two things about it. First of all, up to now she had felt lucky to be getting a pay packet at all. She and her husband were both working 18 months ago, and so was their eldest son. Now, she’s the only breadwinner in the house, and her son has gone back to education — it was either a post-graduate course or emigration.

The reduction from three earners to one in a single household was the first taste of real poverty they experienced. Cars have gone, holidays have gone, all of the little things that made life a bit easier. Even the couple of bottles of wine bought on a Friday evening have been stopped.

And now it’s the necessities they’re cutting back on. Their house is cold, and they’d be embarrassed if you called unexpectedly. Luckily, their VHI is paid through a group scheme, and it was renewed before the increases kick in. But unless he gets a job by the end of the year, or one of the kids leaves home and gets a job, the VHI is going to have to go too.

But the big thing in her head, the thing she really resents, is where all the extra money is going. She, and thousands more like her, have taken a massive hit, and it really hurts. But she wouldn’t mind it so much if it meant that people worse off than herself were helped out.

But that’s not the way it is. Her taxes have gone up, at precisely the same time as supports are being taken away from people who really need them. She’s paying more, in order to pay for longer queues for every form of essential public service. Every penny of extra tax she has to pay — every single penny — has gone to the banks.

She can’t get her head around the injustice of that. Just because we were discussing it (I can never resist playing devil’s advocate), I made the point that there seemed to be little choice. We need a viable banking system. Without one, the entire economy would be in a heap.

Even as I’m saying it, I can see that the logic is entirely false. We’re paying for a defunct banking system, and the economy is still in a heap. People trying to live their lives are being beggared by all this — and surely that’s the very definition of a banjaxed economy. We’re in a vicious downward spiral. And, my friend pointed out, it’s not just us, the taxpayers. In fact, she says, it’s about time the politicians stopped saying that the taxpayers are suffering. Because blind people are suffering. Everyone in a queue for a public service is suffering. So are children, lone parents, carers.

And the most absurd thing of all, she adds, is that people on the minimum wage are going to suffer too. Today, February 1 it comes down by a euro — that’s nearly 15%. And a lot of people on the minimum wage aren’t just going to suffer the cut, they’re going to be hit in all sorts of other ways too. How can anyone on the minimum wage ever afford any kind of health insurance, or cope with increases in local authority rents or ESB charges?

The worst thing of all about the minimum wage cut, of course, is that it’s entirely gratuitous. It serves no purpose whatsoever — it doesn’t get public spending down, and it does nothing for our competitiveness. It’s just a dig at people who can’t defend themselves.

So the bottom line for my friend, who works hard in a demanding job, and who tries her damndest to make life better for other people, is that she and her family are being screwed for no good purpose. As someone who has always been proud to be Irish, she feels totally betrayed by the fact that our country, in her eyes, was sold out to the interests of international banks.

And it was sold out by a government that didn’t even put up a fight. She, and thousands of her fellow citizens, have to pay a huge price — a price that might break her — for the stupidity and incompetence of her government.

That’s when I discovered she had actually voted for them. I’d never have placed her as a Fianna Fáil voter. But she’d had a feeling, she told me, that things were going to go wrong in the economy.

But she had thought long and hard about how she should vote the last time, and had decided in the end that it would be foolish to change horses in mid-stream.

AS a floating voter, she had felt sure that Fianna Fáil would see the downturn coming, and that they would be the best people to manage a soft landing. In one way, she said, I deserve this. I trusted them with my future, and they sold it out, without even thinking about it. But in another way, nobody in Ireland deserves the mess they’ve made. We all tried to do our best by our families, and we all tried to earn our salaries. And we paid our taxes, faithfully and honestly, week after week.

She’s determined to struggle through the hard times, like most people will. And she knows from her work that there are lots and lots of people in an even worse state than hers.

She hasn’t made up her mind yet about how she’s going to vote in the election. I’m trying to persuade her, naturally, to give Labour her number one vote, and there’s no doubt she finds Eamon Gilmore the most impressive and honest leader around. But she has one priority above all else. When she talks about it, you can see the gleam in her eye.

“I’m absolutely determined,” she said, “to take back the vote I gave Fianna Fáil the last time. They betrayed my vote in everything they did, and in the lies they told me. If it takes ten years to get our country back, so be it. But the people who sold us out to the IMF, the people who mortgaged our future for the sake of incompetent banks, can never be forgiven. First I have to get rid of them. Then I have to place my trust in an honest alternative, in the certain knowledge this time that there are no easy answers. Then I’ll get on with the rest of my life.”