No empathy for the most vulnerable in our society

AS Phil Hogan spelled out the details of his household charge in the Dáil, with the stress and emphasis on fines and punishment for non-pay, it became worrying that the failure to relate liability for the new tax to “ability to pay” will expose many to the rigours of those same draconian enforcement plans.

There are many lone parents and pensioners living in houses that they bought years ago and who have seen their incomes cut to the bone and who will simply not be able to pay the €100 charge. The crude disingenuous attempts to minimise the impact on those with little by describing it as “only €2 a week” is a frightening indictment of the Taoiseach’s capacity to understand what living on the breadline is like.

It is hard to know which the worst is — a government that cannot empathise with those who have little, or one who cannot anticipate the utter despair that will be created by the vista of pensioners and others of little means filing through the courts answering summonses for failure to pay a charge they cannot afford.

Jim O’Sullivan

Rathedmond

Sligo