Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The Finance (Local Property Tax) Bill is one of the most odious Bills to come before the Dáil in many a year. It is a tax to transfuse even more of the economic lifeblood of ordinary Irish people to the parasitic bondholders and bankers in the European financial market system and those gamblers who lost in their speculation on the Irish property bubble. Two Quisling Governments have salvaged them with a criminal austerity agenda making working class people pay instead. Labour and Fine Gael will go down in infamy for this legislation which will transform the homes of ordinary people from, what should be a place of happiness and respite from a turbulent world, into a source of constant insecurity and worry with a yearly tax demanded, along with draconian penalties and sanctions implied.

Each and every Labour Member who votes for this new home tax is guilty of sordid treachery against working class people. They have betrayed the people they pledged to protect during the general election campaign. Once the people get the opportunity, they will be swept aside and dumped as comprehensively and contemptuously as their Fianna Fáil predecessors were.

The Government cannot be allowed think that because it has given responsibility for this tax to the Revenue Commissioners, with the power to deduct it from source, that it has, therefore, an intimated population at its mercy. The Revenue Commissioners will rue the day they were given responsibility for the administration and the attempt to collect the poisoned chalice that is the property tax. Revenue will face massive, prolonged, active and organised opposition. It will face a massive boycott of the process of registration and payment for the home tax in April, May, June and July next year. Revenue, if it tries to cow and intimidate decent taxpayers with draconian penalties, interest, court action and fines, will be fought in house-to-house combat with an organised campaign with regional and national solidarity. Revenue, if it instructs employers to deduct this home tax from workers' wages, will face strike action in both public and private sector workplaces as workers will move, inevitably, to defend their already much assaulted wages from a new, unjust and unjustified imposition.

Let no one take seriously the weasel words we heard today from some government Deputies who squealed about a possible injustice and unfairness to the home tax payers of Dublin because of higher house prices there. That is a cheap ploy to divert attention from their treachery and to curry favour with the constituents they are actively betraying in voting for this Bill. This will be in vain. The Government will not face division between urban and rural on the property tax issue but the national solidarity of working people, the unemployed and pensioners. There will be a common and national fight in solidarity against injustice.

Let us have no more of the mendacious formulations that the property tax is a broadening of the tax base.

Section 65 gives the lie to this once and for all since it instructs employers to take the property tax from the same wage that income tax comes out of, in the same way as income tax and at the same time. Let us have no more of this pretence that the property tax comes from some mysterious source other than workers' wages.

There is an alternative: no more of Irish workers' economic lifeblood to bondholders and bankers, tax the super wealthy, invest in public infrastructure to put hundreds of thousands of people back to work and remake this broken economy. It could then provide the taxes and resources we need for our services in health and education and for our elderly people and we could create a decent and sustainable life with dignity for all our people, young and old.

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