Property tax - Pathetic posturing

NO ONE, as this week’s tax defaulters’ list shows, enjoys paying tax, especially a new one but that is how we try to pay for the services this State provides.

Our frightening indebtedness shows how unsuccessful we have been at balancing the books. It shows too how wishful thinking often replaced honesty when decisions on public expenditure were made.

Though there are none so blind as those who will not see, anyone with the perception of a gerbil realises that we cannot continue to borrow something approaching €20 billion a year to pay our day-to-day expenses.

The introduction of a property tax, similar to those almost universal in the real world, is one of the ways the Government proposes to bridge to gap between income and expenditure. In that context, yesterday’s promise by Socialist politicians to “stand to the very end” against a new property charge would have been just laughable if it was not such a pathetic, self-serving denial of our bankrupt reality.