Latest burden is a step too far

The intense campaign of veiled threats, bullying and the instilling of terror and fear in people, which has been the hallmark of this Government’s two years in office, reached a new level in the past week.

We saw their enforcers, Phil Hogan, Michael Noonan and the Revenue Commissioners come out on the issue of the collection of the cruel and unjust family home tax, and the cold and harsh approach they are prepared to adopt in order to chase people down to collect it.

They have admitted that they will be so insensitive that they will even be sending letters to the dead. What next when the dead will not even escape? This is not what people expected when they elected this Government. They promised a new approach, transparency and change. It is obvious the change they meant is what people will have left in their pockets if they are lucky enough after this Government is finished taking what they want.

They are creating a situation where people are expected to beat themselves with their own stick, and if people do not inflict enough pain on themselves to their satisfaction, they threaten to come back with more pain in the form of fines and whatever else they scheme up. Why do they not adopt the same attitude with those that destroyed this country?

Despite Government spin to the contrary, we are told by some commentators that we are only one quarter way through our fiscal adjustment. Going on that, it does not bear thinking what has yet to come down the tracks over the next five years of extra austerity. We continue to see Enda and his team being clapped on the back by foreign bureaucrats for the austerity he is imposing on his fellow countrymen and women to protect bond holders and banks, but like our Government, those bureaucrats have no concept of the pain and the severe social consequences that so many sections of the Irish people have to endure as a result, and even more so in the future.

We have yet again heard Michael Noonan justifying the family home tax by claiming that people can afford this tax because some of them have expensive TV packages. What a despicable statement. Does he not realise that may be the only entertainment left for many people?

With very many people and families finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, he now wants to deny them watching TV, along with turning off heating and light and deferring mortgage payments in order to pay this unjust family home tax. All this so that he and his colleagues can get another pat on the back.

Christy Kelly

Templeglantine

Co Limerick