Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The debate has been thrown into confusion by the readjustment of time earlier. It is totally unacceptable that this important debate is being curtailed in this way. The Minister of State has not been here for the discussion and has not heard the points we made, yet he is responding for the Government. It shows complete disrespect on the part of the Government for the Dáil. Where is the senior Minister who is piloting the Bill?

This is a despicable new tax. It is putting a burden on the shoulders of the majority of people at the diktat of the IMF, EU and European Central Bank as part of their general agenda that the Irish people have to pay sweat and blood from their resources, through punitive taxation and cuts, to save the European bankers, speculators, hedge fund operators and other financial gamblers that bet and lost in the Irish property market in private deals for private profit. That, in a nutshell, is what this tax is about.

The Labour Party Deputies and others who support this and other measures avoid the obvious and the truth of the situation. The argument of dismissing the tax as costing €2 per week is spurious. The ESRI, a Government think tank, has already laid out the future. There will be a property tax of €700 or €800 per household and a water tax of €500. That is the agenda.

This is the platform for a new swathe of taxation that will cost every household in the country up to €1,300 and beyond in due course. The so-called waiver scheme does not apply to the huge majority of low-income workers, unemployed people, pensioners and middle income workers who are already suffering grievously. Those in negative equity who were trapped by blackmail speculation in order to have the right to a home over their heads are now being treated to injury upon insult with this extra taxation.

The claim by a Fine Gael Deputy that there would have been no property bubble if a property tax was in existence is utter rubbish. Would a property tax of €500, €600, €700 or €800 have stopped the orgy of speculation by developers and bankers in the 2000s? It is notable that Fine Gael significantly and pointedly refused to call for a halt to the type of speculation and profiteering that was going on and created the current crisis.

The Labour Party Deputies are rolling in here pleading for local services and saying that the charge is needed. The Labour Party used to stand for taxation justice. Taxation justice would suggest that a tax on the €219 billion which exists in the financial and other assets of the top 5% of this society, as outlined by the Central Statistics Office and adjudicated on by Credit Suisse which is no left-wing think tank, would not just bring in €160 million for local government but billions of euro to enable the real development of local authority services.

We should stop paying the bondholders. We should not pay the €1.1 billion or €1.2 billion that is supposed to be paid by the middle of January. That is how we can raise the money. What happened to taxation justice?

It is not just the left that will oppose this. I predict that for a vast swathe of ordinary people who do not consider themselves to be political this will become a major issue of controversy in the next four months. I predict that hundreds of thousands of households, comprising ordinary, decent, law-abiding, tax paying pensioners and others, will exercise their discretion not to pay. They will use their right to non-payment as a protest and a means to stand up and be counted against the humiliations heaped on them in the last three years. The Government will have to contend with that. It will have to decide whether it wants to be the rack-renting landlord dragging decent people in front of the courts. There will be a major campaign of people power in every county, town and city to defeat this tax. The Fine Gael and Labour parties will rue the day they sought to impose this unjust burden on our people.

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