Where do our taxes go now we’ve a levy on everything?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

What do we pay our taxes for? Yes, we all know that it’s ostensibly to fund public services – but where?

If it’s for the roads, well, we also pay road tax and now our property tax will also go to their upkeep.

Bigger projects are done on a public private partnership, and for that we will invariably end up paying a toll – so we cough up that way too.

If it’s for refuse services, it’s not – because they’ve all been privatised and anyway we paid for them before this, only it was directly to the County Council.

Now that they’re privatised, nobody has a say on how much they’ll cost because the state handed over that golden ticket to private operators, some of whom in turn have slashed the wages of workers to a pittance.

If it’s for free education, it’s not – because university fees are rising faster than the cost of a semi-detached home in Dublin, and every school in Ireland is badgering parents for what is supposed to be a ‘voluntary donation’ to keep the show on the road after capitation grants were slashed to pieces.

If it’s for water, it’s not – because we’re seeing the meters spreading across the nation like a virus. And even with ‘Big Phil’ Hogan now safely ensconced in Euope, we’ll know all about the cost of water then.

If it’s for health care, it’s not – we’re still the ones paying health insurance, and while nobody would deny proper health care to those who cannot afford it, we might all save money if they took the layers of bureaucracy out and ran the entire system as one, just like you’d think anyone would do for a facility servicing a population of just four million people.

If it’s for the upkeep of footpaths or hedgerows, it’s not – because you can say we either pay for those through our Local Property Tax or, given the state of them, you can argue that there’s little or no money spent on them anyway.

If it’s for building local authority houses, it’s not – we haven’t seen one of those in years because Councils came to depend on developers to throw a few in with their cardboard estates so that the local authorities themselves no longer had to bother.

And when the property bubble burst, it was so long since they’d had to budget for this that they’d forgotten how to do it.

If it’s for farm subsidies, it’s not – they come from Brussels. Same for disadvantaged areas and other schemes of that ilk.

If it’s for our oil exploration programme or our leveraging of natural resources, it’s not – because we handed them over with a subservient doff of the cap to foreign interests a generation ago.

It’s also looking like it’s not to subsidise public transport either, because so many routes have been cancelled or drastically reduced because of poor numbers….which was supposed to be the very reason we paid Bus Eireann a massive subsidy in the first place.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.