There’s nothing fair about it

YOUR columnist Fergus Finlay wonders what all the fuss is about asking pensioners to pay a “fair” tax (Opinion, Jan 10).

Does he believe it’s enough to call something fair in order for it to be so? Was it fair that Minister Michael Noonan omitted this tax measure from his budget speech in November, or that hundreds of thousands of our tax compliant elderly citizens were terrified out of the skins by the recent letters sent to them by this government via its revenue department?

Does Mr Finlay believe the flat household charge is a fair tax? Does Mr Finlay believe it is fair that the very many relatively young pensioners (some his former colleagues) who have left Leinster House in recent times and who are neither old, poor nor weak, didn’t receive said letter from the revenue this January?

Does Mr Finlay really believe he can cloak the damage his friends in the Labour party are doing to the weakest in our society with a fig leaf he chooses to call fair?

Kieran McCarthy

Rushbrooke

Cobh

Co Cork