Tax returns beyond expectations: Resist chance to buy election

BY any criteria, exchequer figures released yesterday, showing that the State collected €45.6bn in tax last year, up €4.32bn on 2014 and €3.3bn more than the forecast at the start of 2015, represent an astounding change in fortunes for this small, open economy, especially as the carnage wreaked by the recession less than a decade ago is still so fresh in our memories. 

Those wounds have not yet healed as they must.

Though this is a huge relief and tremendously welcome, there is an air of a young man winning the Lotto just days before his stag party. The timing of this unexpected good fortune might make restraint difficult, newly-found capabilities might make temptations irresistible. Maturity and responsibility might be disastrously deferred again.

In the past, this windfall would have been used to bolster the Government’s election war chest. We would have been offered all sorts of wonderful things and we might, as history shows, succumbed and have been foolish enough to jump through the appropriate hoops come election day.

The most pressing issues facing this society are the same whether or not an election looms. We urgently need housing. We urgently need a solution to so many health service issues. We need to re-engineer third-level colleges’ finances, and we need to rebuild infrastructure damage by the floods. Using this unexpected opportunity to buy the election would be, to use an emotive phrase, economic treason.