Motor tax hike is enough to drive us all round the bend

THE motor tax hike announced so sneakily after the budget is a stealth tax pure and simple.

It is designed to shore up the public finances after their abuse by a Government intent on re-election even at the cost of total chaos in the overall economy.

Why should ordinary people pay for the stupidity and the egomania of our political masters? The explanation that the rise would be used solely to maintain the level of funding for the country’s non-national roads is obscene.

This funding will actually need to increase if its real value is to hold in the wake of inflation, rising labour costs and the new 13.5% VAT rate. While the motor tax increase alone might be manageable, it comes against a shocking battery of price increases announced over the summer, and again in the budget. House budgets are taking a hammering.

The message is: be you not sick, be you not disabled, be you not less well off, be you not a young person starting out in life, be you not a CE scheme worker, be you not a student, be you not a farmer.

The tax hike has really been introduced because local government funding has been cut. The composition and funding of local government need to be pulled apart and put back together again.

We badly need the kind of political change that will ensure such gross mismanagement of our resources never again happens. All the bad eggs of all the major parties, and those surrounding them, should go off to the political equivalent of Lough Derg and pass the baton to a newer, more idealistic and courageous generation.

Sean McKiernan (Jnr),

Trinity Bungalow,

Virginia Road,

Bailieboro,

Co Cavan.