These tax laws are immoral - €1,900 bill on €77m profit

THOSE who benefitted from the immoral tax laws which allowed the vulture fund that bought Nama’s NI €1.6bn loans to pay less than €1,900 in tax on a €77m profit are laughing all the way to the bank. But they must also be laughing at what passes for political opposition in this country and, probably, all around the world.

We cannot, however, laugh, as the joke is on us. At the moment, when this entirely legal fleecing is highlighted, what passes for opposition focusses on water charges. Those opposed to the charges should “polish their protest boots”, declared AAA/PBP TD, Mick Barry. It is hard to think of a more tragic inability to see the wood from the trees, or a more pathetic, self-defeating order of priorities.

The international tax arrangements enjoyed by apex capitalists are a threat to our way of life, yet there is no rallying cry from left or right to confront these entirely legal engines of inequity. Why is this? Have we become utterly supine?

It’s nearly half a century since Britain’s Tory prime minister, Ted Heath — he would hardly have felt the need to go to Havana this week — coined the phrase: “The unacceptable face of capitalism”. What a tragedy, what a failure of our democracies it is that that face becomes ever more prominent in our lives. These tax arrangements will, eventually, one way or another, provoke change. We should confront them while the nature of that change remains an open question.