Anger over property tax compounded by our national pastime for whingeing

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

It could be 15 years ago that I was on a train from Galway to Dublin on a Sunday night – and somewhere between Clara and Nowhere, the locomotive broke leaving us all stranded for almost two hours as they waited for a replacement to arrive from Dublin.

Iarnród Éireann was going through one of its periodic ‘customer is king’ phases at the time. And as we finally neared Dublin some poor guy with a clipboard was dispatched to take note of the complaints.

And boy was he busy, as they gave graphic details of missed flights and the vital business appointments and the events they had missed, for which no money could compensate, but still they would take any compensation that was going.

I didn’t complain. Maybe I was jealous that I wasn’t important enough to be catching a business flight or that my presence wasn’t essential at some business conference. The most I was missing was probably Glenroe or the start of the Sunday Game or a dinner gone cold.

I must say I was suspicious at how many very important people were on the train with me.

My logical (or maybe cynical) side was saying: “Most of these people just want to whinge out loud.”

Despite the best efforts of ‘Ballyhea says No’ and Fintan O’Toole and all the left-wing parties, Irish people just haven’t done mass protests or riots or taken to the streets like the Greeks or the Spanish.

But what the Irish have attained world class status at is whinging. We take our medicine but boy do we moan about it. The preferred outlet isn’t a mass rally outside the Dáil on Kildare Street but via the telephone, or Joe Duffy or Sean O’Rourke or on Keith Finnegan or whatever.

And so it is with the property tax. There is genuine confusion and there are people who feel hard done by. But I can’t help feeling that there is a large element of whinging, people venting their general unhappiness, blowing something that is a a relatively small problem into the biggest crisis of confidence since the foundation of the State.

And so the first thing I’ll say about the property tax controversy as it related to early payments is that there has been a whinge factor. Perhaps a minority one, but it has been there nonetheless.

The way the property tax has happened has been very telling of the kind of society we have. It replaced the temporary household charge which was a bit of a fiasco.

Once the Revenue took over there was to be no messing. It shows the fear of God the Commissioners strike into people. Hopes by left-wing parties of mounting a popular boycott fell flat on its face.

Statistics show that of the 1.56 million homes registered for the tax, the compliance rate for this year (2013) has been over 90 per cent. From the start, they made it clear that those who did not pay would face the full panoply of sanctions available to Revenue for defaulters in other taxes.

Did the ploy work? Of course it did.

What the Revenue did do when they took over the administration of the tax was they asked for an extra six months to design the scheme. That meant there was a gap for the first six months this year when there was neither a household charge nor a property tax.

The upshot was that the new tax was kind of eased in – for only six months in 2013. It meant households only paid half the tax this year.

Politically, that was beneficial for the Government as well. They could introduce a very harsh new tax but gradually.

Looking through the statistics provided by Revenue for the first year of operation, a few things stand out like a sore thumb.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.