Olivia O’Leary
Olivia O’Leary In her radio column for RTÉ One’s Drivetime last night tackled taxation, ‘toilers’ and ‘dossers’. With even a dig at Denis.
Count the number of times, even in the last week, when you’ve heard the phrase, “the burden of taxation”, somebody said to me on Saturday. He’s right. Journalists use it, politicians use it, the Taoiseach himself used the same phrase in Brussels only on Saturday. The language we use is full of conscious or unconscious values.
Is taxation to be seen merely as a burden or is it something we pay proudly: our declaration that we want to have a decent society because you can’t, on one hand for instance, protest at the level of homelessness and, on the other, lobby for a reduction in your taxes.
There are thousands of people in the housing list in Dun Laoghaire and yet the council representing one of the most prosperous areas in the country opted to reduce local property tax by 15% for this year. Dublin City Council did the same – despite warnings from the county manager that it could hit services for the homeless.
There is a link between the two. The question of taxation and our attitude to it was a central theme, raised by participants on Saturday, at an Áras an Uachtaran seminar to mark the culmination of the President’s year-long initiative.
He is a thinker himself and he’s asked the rest of us to think whether it’s possible to live ethically in a contemporary world. There were community groups, NGOs and academics there. The academics addressed some of the philosophical questions: why can’t we be happy with what we need rather than what we want?
Needs can be satisfied but wants are insatiable and they discussed whether you can have a more ethical society when multi-national companies that are more powerful than democratically-elected governments and where the need to lobby for commercial research funding skews the independence of our leading universities.
But the more general discussion kept coming around to taxation as the most effective way of showing our solidarity with one another, of choosing a decent society.
One speaker criticised the fact that people who were tax exiles from this country were lauded here as being generous and charitable. She would be much more impressed if they stayed here and paid their taxes, she said.
She’s right. I mean you mightn’t be Michael O’Leary’s biggest fan but at least he lives here and pays his taxes here. And that brought me to thinking about our taxation arrangements with multi-nationals which are at the very core of our industrial investment strategy.
We are able to charge only 12.5% corporate tax because we never had the big industrial base that other countries had – a base on whose tax their exchequers became dependent.
We didn’t become dependent on it because we never had it. Our low corporate tax rate which brings so many companies and jobs here is one of the advantages perhaps of having been poor and I’m not going to apologise for that.
But we have been accused of facilitating multi-nationals in paying pretty well no tax at all. We have to decide ethically where we draw the line between using a fair advantage which history gives us and where we allow companies to dodge their taxes almost completely, robbing not only our own coffers but other countries’ coffers of their revenue which supports necessary public services.
And going back to how important language is, I got a magazine, called Business Plus, free with my Sunday newspaper this weekend. The editorial made the point that social democracy meant taking money from people who have it and handing it out to people who have less.
‘It only became possible when universal suffrage was rolled out in the 20th century,’ went the editorial, ‘thereby granting the same political clout to the dosser as the toiler’.
Well now, who are the dossers? If the writer means the unemployed, isn’t it interesting that, during the boom when jobs were freely available, people took them to the point that we had effective full employment, not too many dossers there.
And now that jobs are coming back into the economy, the jobless rate is going down again – most people want to work and pay their taxes and provide a proper safety net in case they, or anybody else, becomes jobless or homeless.
If they become jobless they get some income and an Intreo service which tries to get them back to work again – those are the services our taxes pay for. All that, it would seem to me, is at the centre of an ethical society. That’s why tax is not a dirty word.
Listen back here
” multi-national companies that are more powerful than democratically-elected governments ”
The core of the problem of democracies today. There isn’t really any democracy anymore. There’s compromised politicians, hungry for power who are at the mercy of international business.
Wait for TPP and TTP to kick in !
Woman who is paid by the tax payer lectures the public about paying taxes.
Take a hike Olivia.
Is she a public or civil servant?
And ad revenue.
Good job missing the point entirely.
1) Think she pays taxes too.
2) This is not the MOST stupid rationale for dismissing someone I’ve ever heard, but it’s certainly up there.
…this is vintage O’Leary stuff but it is diminished by her unwavering support support for the Labour party and defending the indefensible.
I’d agree that anybody who supports the labour party in an ‘unwavering’ manner has a credibility problem. However, and this is a problem that’s going to get asked more and more, say Olivia woke up tomorrow with a crisis of conscience – hell, say any of us did and wanted our votes to matter – is there a party that offers any modicum of honesty, compassion, lack of spin and isn’t tainted by either paedo-protecting kangaroo courts, or reckless boomtime spending?
In other words, undermining somebody like Olivia O’Leary because she supports the Labour Party, whilst valid – to a point – is unfair, in that anybody who supports any of the mainstream parties has a similar credibility problem in some shape/make/form, don’t they?
” opted to reduce local property tax by 15% for this year”
Ummm… no they didn’t.
Last year, they charged 50% of the full year rate. This year, they reduced the full year rate by 15%, so are still charging 85% of last year’s full-year rate; that’s an increase of 70% on the amount they charged year-on-year.
I thought it was a brilliant tactical move – to get people to believe that the councils were being ‘nice’ to them!
Wizard’s First Rule, peoples…
* Grabs wand, begins to chant *
This is my wand, and this is my gun, this is for magic and this is for fun !
I invoke the Sixth, Tenth and Twelfth rule!
All the “left” new counsillors wanted to show that they had kept their promises to reduce the property tax (now that they’ve figured out they can’t remove it).
What hasn’t dawned on them yet is that larger houses got the biggest reduction, millionaire row best of all. Or that money raised is taxes is used for other things like building social housing, parks, libraries and other local authority services.
+1
Irish socialists. Want low taxes and the government to still pay for everything.
Hence intellectually dishonest Sinn Fein’s magic money tree to appeal to the simpletons.
I’ve a friend who’s a dosser. He’s also an accomplished climber and lacking sponsorship he lives on the dole. He’s one of the reasons I don’t mind paying taxes.
And you’re one of the reasons he doesn’t feel guilty, snuggled up on the sofa watching Sex and the City box sets while, outside, the rain batters the window pane..
Or scaling the side of a cliff with the wind cutting him in two.
“And going back to how important language is, I got a magazine, called Business Plus, free with my Sunday newspaper this weekend. The editorial made the point that social democracy meant taking money from people who have it and handing it out to people who have less.
‘It only became possible when universal suffrage was rolled out in the 20th century,’ went the editorial, ‘thereby granting the same political clout to the dosser as the toiler’.”
Is this some sort of April fool? Since when did being female or working 14 hour days in a mill (but crucially failing to own forty shillings worth of land) equal dossing?
Being poor, or poorly paid, is always the same as dossing. Always.
Re: The Importance of language.
I listened back.
It’s O’Leary (rhymes with weary) not O’Leary (rhymed with wary).
“the combination of the President’s year-long initiative.” – she actually said ‘culmination’.
“the need to lobby for professional research funding” – she actually said ‘commercial’
“the most effective way to skewing our solidarity with one another” – she actually said ‘showing’
“But we have been accused of facilitating multi-nationals and paying pretty well no tax at all.”- she actually said ‘in paying pretty well no tax at all’
This sloppy transcription skews and misrepresents her essay. The Importance of language, me hole. And don’t get me started on punctuation, absent commas, semi-colons and question marks.
Thanks isallimsaying, Admin’s going to fix those now.
Aww. Now I feel petty and overly pedantic. BTW there’s no ‘a’ in the middle of my name, but it’s nice.
Hi isallimsaying, thanks. That’s fixed now. Sorry.