Overthrow new rack-renters

There have been many extortionist measures introduced by the present and previous coalition governments but a tax on domestic water must rank as the most unjust, cowardly and disgraceful of all.

Over the coming weeks the parties who have conceived and imposed this unfair burden on already struggling households will be sending people to our doors to ask us to vote for their candidates in the May 23 elections.

I am sure that most of those who have chosen to carry the banner for Fianna Fáil, The Green Party, Fine Gael and Labour are fine, upstanding and honest individuals but yet, dear citizen they are fully committed to taxing the water that comes from your tap or even from your private well, regardless of how rich or poor you may be.

As the centenary of the Easter Rising approaches, it is worth remembering why those heroes of 1916 were willing to lay down their lives for a just cause. They fought against the tyranny of landlordism, tithes and rack-rents, hearth taxes and window taxes and all of the other unjust measures that were imposed by the foreign oppressors who then ruled the country.

One hundred years later the foreign tyrant has been replaced by native ones but the tune is still the same. Government spokespersons are behaving like the rabbit that is caught in the car headlights as they try to lie and bluff their way through the water tax issue until the upcoming elections are over. None of them will admit that the water tax is soon to reach €600 (according to recent reports) or that Irish Water is likely to be sold off to the highest bidders who can charge whatever they want, probably in excess of €1,000 per year.

Below is an extract from Patrick Pearse’s Graveside Panegyric for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa on 1 August 1915 at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin: “This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them.”

Over the coming weeks you can tell those who carry the flag for the modern tyrants what you think about their water tax.

PJ Ó Domhnaill

Cnoc an Stolaire

Bun Beag

Co Dhún na nGall