Now this is where it could get interesting.
Aye, strangely everyone's gone quiet
Just wanted to know the official published figures, if there are any?
House Hold Charge
- Thread starter Ravenbyrne
- Start date
Aye, strangely everyone's gone quiet
Just wanted to know the official published figures, if there are any?
OK; I'm not a student of politics or finance & don't have figures but as I see it (long rant follows): -
Up to 1977 rates were payable on all property; the Finna Fail party brought voter support with the abolition of rates on private (non commercial) property. Rates supported local government - local government now relied to a greater degree on central government so it really was no longer local except that it collected commercial rates. These rates & charges escalated & were thought by employers to be anti business.
The 1977 manifesto was unsustainable & taxation on income became penal. We had a recession in the 80's - it was a decade of stagnation & emigration (like today); taxing property rather than labour was a no go area as far as the electorate was concerned & the political parties lacked the balls to tackle the issues.
In the early 90's a recovery occurred fuelled by a strong technology based export sector - mostly IT & pharmaceuticals. This recovery ultimately generated a property bubble that popped about 4 years ago. Throughout this Celtic Tiger era income tax was reduced, increasing disposable income but government still needed to raise revenue. There was an aborted attempt to introduce a charge on private property about 15 years ago; the parties now in power resisted this & a strong property owning middle class saw it peter out.
Stamp duty is a tax on property but is only levied when property is purchased; it is not an ongoing charge. The property bubble drove up prices & activity – the government was awash with stamp duty generated cash & as in 1977 it bought voter popularity with voter cash in the form of cutting other taxes & raising wages. All this ground to a halt & we are now in a bad place.
Income tax has not been increased to any great degree; the higher rate of vat was recently increased. Various charges such as waste collection & a proposed water payment are unpopular – when was tax popular? All the time we are staggering to an inevitable property tax which is initially a flat charge & is as such “unfair” – when was tax fair? The property tax will be graded in that one will pay in proportion to the value of the property within given bands but for now it is controversial.
What goes for a debate is being fuelled by the opposition which for the first time has a strong Sinn Fein presence plus a lot of independents who espouse a left wing political doctrine (as do I to a degree). Finna Fail - now in opposition & eyeing up working class support , are (as always) being opportunistic.
All of this happens against the background of bailing out the banks & paying the bond holders. As leading economists can’t agree on the rights or wrongs of this it is difficult to call what the right course of action should have been. As I see it Anglo Irish Bank should have been let go bust but the other commercial banks had to be saved & this was not going to be cheap. We now await growth to lift us from under the burden of debt but balancing the national books (austerity) is not expanding economic activity & counters the growth we need.
Meanwhile a picture in yesterday’s Irish Times showed some of our leading left wingers protesting against a tax on property. The Irish do not protest with the same panache as the Greeks but they have a strong sense of what they are against. When you boil it down we are against all government; some social theorists put this down to a post colonial mindset that can’t actually get its head around the idea that we govern ourselves. Put another way it is all the “Brits” fault – did I already say that Sinn Fein are increasing their vote here?
So there you have it – I own a house that I don’t pay any tax on. I still have some degree of a social conscience that suggests that there should be taxes on wealth & that property is wealth – am I the only turkey voting for Christmas? Meanwhile we await a decision on the necessity of a referendum to ratify the EU fiscal compact; Finna Fail say we should have this referendum anyway even if there is no constructional imperative to do so - but they will then campaign for acceptance! The referendum will be largely about domestic rather than European issues & will certainly have impassioned debate on septic tanks. Septic tanks – oh I should have mentioned this earlier; water quality issues dictate that these must be inspected & a charge will attach for this – or is it a tax? Either way (you may be ahead of me here) we are not going to pay – well not until we see a banker jailed for bankrupting the country. The bankers were Irish – we did all this to ourselves – the price of independence – the price of deregulation – the price of not enforcing what few regulations were left. The price of greed; our Taoiseach mentioned the greed word in a moment of candour recently - it did not go down well.
I once read that John B Keane said that there would be no happiness in Ireland ‘till everyman had more than the next. Kerry people will tell you he was the smartest man ever – he wrote down everything they said & charged them to read it. Perhaps a tax on bullshit – what do I owe?
Many thanks Gerry, well written
So let me get this straight............
You pay Stamp Duty when you purchase a house
tax
You pay no ongoing property tax on an annual basis on it, to support local services that you use
Tax is in the form of personal income tax from employment, that supports local and national government operations
VAT is also levied on all goods and services from clothes/food/fuel/heating/insurance etc to go into the Dail's coffers
Motoring taxes - do you have tax on insurance/excise tax on vehicles and what's the rate on fuel duty?
Are there Landfill and Waste disposal taxes for commercial businesses
Businesses only pay rates on property
What about Capital Gains and Death/Estate taxation?
Am I correct?
No axe to grind, just interested on how Eire differs from the UK, because we seem to be taxed on anything & everything
Well summarised, Gerry.
I love receiving a balanced and reasoned opinion, even if I don't agree with it....in this case I do.
I hate pub politicians....."THEY should do this", "THEY shouldn't do that".
When asked how the books should then be balanced...."I don't know but that's nothing to do with this tax, which I shouldn't have to pay".
I'm glad you're using your free time constructively, Gerry.
I love receiving a balanced and reasoned opinion, even if I don't agree with it....in this case I do.
I hate pub politicians....."THEY should do this", "THEY shouldn't do that".
When asked how the books should then be balanced...."I don't know but that's nothing to do with this tax, which I shouldn't have to pay".
I'm glad you're using your free time constructively, Gerry.
thats good bit info gerry, good read
i am confused (so easy happen i know), had rang in and asked and was told i was exempt as still on the mortgage tax relief as only got 1st house 3 year ago. thats nto to say they didnt get mixed up either
hmmm i better look into this a bit more cheers
General info here: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland
Specifically I purchased a house in 87 in an unfashonable area at a modest price & as a first time buyer was exempt from stamp duty.
I paid income tax & still do on my pension to central revenue - they financed the local authority - bin charges were introduced I paid these & still do to the now privatised service.
Vat is complex - see wikipedia link.
Motoring tax is penal - the fuel here has vat & excise duty& you pay vat on the excise or excise on the vat (I'm confused on that)
In addition we have vehicle registration tax (+ vat)
I've never ran a business but friends who do pay a lot of charges & rates.
There is capital gains & death duties.
Ultimately we & you are taxed on everything but we were spared a standing charge on private property - that is changing.
Personally I favour taxes on consumption as it is less difficult to avoid than a tax on imcome (the grey ecomomy) - the wealthy consume more so a tax on consumption is fairer.
Like a lot of european democracies the marginalised in Ireland don't vote in the same proportion as the better off - the better off tend therefore to have more influence on the political system.
I heard an ecomomist on the radio recently state that the wealthy invest to secure recovery & the poor spend to fuel that recovery.
Wage rates here have fallen but core walfare rates have remained untoutched - some say (with justification) that the incentive to get out of your pyjamas is just not there.
All quiet complex & no matter what the opposition say there are no easy solutions.
We badly need political leadership - that is in short supply. Irish people once looked to their various churches (mostly Rome) for a moral compass but that compass did not operate much beyond the realm of personal sexual morality; we are not going there now in any detail but those days are over.
There is a huge deficit in that there is no social cohesion in a largely post religous society - like the UK?
The statistics show that Ireland is not an overtaxed country by comparison with its EU neighbours, and in almost all of them a range of local taxes or service charges are accepted as normal.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0218/1224311977434.html
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2012/0218/1224311977434.html
thanks gerry ....you nailed it.
unfortunately the truth is not very popular because it would mean , change, and a society so badly caught up in the past is not very willing to move on.
We all know what went wrong in 2008 but without leadership we will repeat all mistakes again.
the only solution I can imagine to work is a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT ... all parties represented in percentage of votes and lots of public debate.........
what's your take ????
unfortunately the truth is not very popular because it would mean , change, and a society so badly caught up in the past is not very willing to move on.
We all know what went wrong in 2008 but without leadership we will repeat all mistakes again.
the only solution I can imagine to work is a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT ... all parties represented in percentage of votes and lots of public debate.........
what's your take ????
Strong leadership would still be required.
Democracy is a powerful idea but politicians are scared of doing what must be done because of their fear of the next election. They are hooked on an adult form of adolescent popularity craving.
One possible solution =
(or its equivalent 75 years on) it generates strong resolute leadership but there are down sides there also.It has been argued that fundamentally two forces motivate humans fear & greed. 2008 should have taught us to fear greed - you are correct in that it could all easily repeat itsef. A bit pessimistic but Irish people always find a way to scrape through in the end despite the political system not because of it.
A reinvention of strong local communities (without the strong personal moral policing element as documented by so many Irish writers of the 1900's) feeding into reinvigorated local government all presided over by a slimmed down national executive gives a bottom up system - the top down one is not working & may not be workable.
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