A clean way of dipping into your back pockets

Country Living with Francis Farragher –

If right was right, as they say out the country, we should all be giving ourselves a clap in the back this month as another little tax is stealthily slipped in, supposedly on environmental grounds.

Since the beginning of the month, a bag of coal has gone up in price by €1.20 and a bale of briquettes by 52 cent as we in Ireland valiantly play our part in trying to save the planet.

That €1.20 on a bag of coal now brings the total carbon tax on this purchase to €2.40, and while this might make us look good with the ‘big wigs’ in Europe and in the environmental lobby, it all adds up to looting more money out of the pockets of ordinary people whether they be workers or pensioners.

The Carbon Tax will end up of course being swallowed up in the coffers of central Government, not making one jot of difference to environmental issues but next winter for a pensioner finding it hard to make ends meet, it is a €2.40 that they could do with in their own pockets or their own stoves.

In the UK they seem to have copped on to the fact that somewhere along the way, a balance must be found between imposing draconian taxes and allowing people – especially the more vulnerable and less well off – to stay warm during the winter.

Chancellor George Osborne announced that Carbon Tax levels would be ‘frozen’ at their 2015 levels until the end of the decade but here in Ireland, the tax was slapped on again from May 1 by Michael Noonan, despite pleas from different groups for him to at least defer the rise.

The Brits, for all their perceived faults, do at least tend to look after their own. Coal keeps millions of houses warm in the UK each winter, and ongoing increases in the Carbon Tax, would have meant less warmth for many people over the winter months.

Here in Ireland we tend to take a different view. A little pat on the back from the EU for the Irish goodie-goodies and on goes another tax on solid fuel, quite sneakily slipped in on the first day of summer when the necessity for home heating is diminishing for the season.

Earlier this month, people like Michael Kilcoyne, Chairman of the Irish Consumers Association, made the point that the Carbon Tax, had little to with the environment – it was just ‘another means of draining money from households’.

He pleaded with the Government to defer the imposition of this latest leg of the Carbon Tax, in order to allow household incomes to improve, especially in the wake of the property tax and the water tax that’s now on the way.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.