Mattie McGrath (Tipperary South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am. I am pointing out that when one gets away with robbing millions it is easy to rob thousands from people. The figures are in the Minister of State's speech. This is unbelievable. Surely if it is too costly to post cheques to people they could be given it in cash over the counter. When people tried to pay their household charge with cash it was refused. The Government and agencies refused to cash payments in respect of the household charge and have now decided it would be too complex and costly to repay people in respect of overcharges. I have heard it all now. These are the Minister of State's words, not mine. The Minister of State's speech states that analysis conducted at the time showed that, arising from charging at one tenth rather than one twelfth of the annual rate per month, there were 375,000 instances of overcharging. The banks did it and got away with it. Local authorities are now admitting that they did and got away with it. I am not blaming the council officials or staff who were only doing what they were told. There were more than 375,000 instances of overcharging, which is only 125,000 short of half a million, totalling €3.8 million. One would think it was only chaff out of the back of a combine. In 2011, people were overcharged by €3.8 million, which is hard earned money on which they had already paid tax. It is an outrage. The average payment was just over €10, 93% of payments were under €20, 0.3% of payments were in excess of €100 and the cost associated with directly repaying the excess tax charged via a cheque in the post would, in a large proportion of cases, exceed the amount of money due to the individual. Does a cheque and a stamp cost more than €10, €20 or €100? Who is the Government codding? Is official Government so arrogant now that it believes people are fools and amadáns and that we will accept and support this? This is outrageous. It is not surprising we are accepting a diktat from Europe.

The Minister of State referred to the new plastic card licence. I renewed my licence last September. Am I correct that Ireland is the first country in Europe to introduce such a card? I acknowledge that the Road Safety Authority has done a great number of things. Why, regardless of what it is doing, does it have to roll out Gay Byrne? I do not know what we will do when he is gone to his eternal reward. Just because he invested stupidly twice does not mean we should be paying him to appear continually on RTE and on behalf of the Road Safety Authority. As I have said thousands of times previously, my children do not know who Gay Byrne is. If we want to get the road safety message out to young drivers on our roads we should be using sports and music people to do so, not Gay Byrne. While he was a good presenter in his time he should be off enjoying the pension given to him by RTE rather than appearing on this, that and the other programme, in particular on behalf of the Road Safety Authority. Gay Byrne has always had little respect for rural Ireland and its people. It was all very fine for him to travel on his Harley Davidson or by taxi from the Hill of Howth to RTE. The same applies to the infamous Noel Brett and former Minister, Noel Dempsey, the champion of road safety who ran away like a scalded cat having caused great affray. He abolished the dual mandate and, as I call it, "bittered" local government because what he did caused a sour taste. However, he is gone.

The Minister of State's speech reads:

.....In relation to the charging of arrears at the current rate of tax when the owner is paying back-tax, i.e. charging the higher rate for the full arrears when the arrears owed straddle a change in the rates of tax, this is of significance for a number of months immediately after an increase in motor tax rates. Calculating arrears based on a split calculation creates difficulties in the NVDF, and it is not intended to provide for refunds of tax where arrears straddle a rate increase.

If I were to go into a pub tonight and be charged €7 for a pint I would kick up a fuss and refuse to pay it. This Government is demanding money from people and refusing to repay overcharges because the process of doing so is too difficult. The Gestapo did not do this in its day. This is grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented, GUBU.

The Minister of State's speech further states:

.....In relation to the rate increase from 01 January 2013, it is estimated that the overcharging arising amounts to less than €10 in over 92% of cases.....

It is as if €10 does not matter. Under the recently introduced insolvency legislation PIPs - I call them pups or predators - will take more money from people and tell them that they must live on €10 or €20 a week. The Minister of State's speech refers to overcharging in 92% of cases being less than €10 and in 98% of cases being less €20. It is as if those amounts of money did not matter. At the same time another agency of government is telling people they have to live on those amounts. That legislation, which the Government proclaims as wonderful, is not worth the paper it is written on. All it will do is push people into the hands of moneylenders again. The PIPs - I call them predators - will talk to the banks on behalf of people but they will have to pay them €3,000 or €4,000 for doing so, which is disgusting and immoral. It is worse than grotesque. I do not know from where this is coming. The Minister of State further stated that very small numbers of cases exceed €50, with €217 being the maximum as if that was the amount one would give a child making his or her confirmation. The people who wrote that speech - they may be in the Chamber and I do not wish to insult them - have little care or understanding of the people of rural Ireland or any taxpayer in Ireland. I say that with the greatest of respect.

They have the attitude that they are the people who cannot be touched. Some of those people were exempted from having to pay the pension levy when lies were told to the late Minister, Deputy Lenihan, to the effect that there were only 120 people in the band earning more than €100,000. However, when I tabled a motion before my parliamentary party and researched this, for which the late Minister thanked me, he found out that there were 700 or 800 such people and they had never paid a pension levy because they had the ear of the Minister and were in his offices. It is a disgusting betrayal of the democratic process in this country. The sooner people recognise this the better or we will have riots on the streets. This is simply outrageous. I cannot believe it.

There is a need for a deterrent, and we must have deterrents but the deterrent is the law enforced by the Garda Síochána. One is stopped at checkpoints by the Garda. There are toll bridges. There are Garda vans everywhere. We are told they are there for safety but it has nothing to do with safety. There are very few accidents in my constituency and Deputy Tom Hayes, who is in the Chair, will not disagree with me on that. Garda vans park in a sneaky way and a light flashes if one passes them. I have thankfully never been the victim of any of them. Perhaps my van would not go fast enough or as I was driving by I may have been looking over the ditch at crops where the Minister, Deputy Coveney, says a bale of hay will be dropped from a helicopter. The Government is going to give one bale of hay to each farmer yet it is going to make farmers tax the tractors that they have had in their farmyards with a yardscraper for the past 20 years. A farmer with a TVO tractor, a David Brown or a Massey Vintage could not have such a tractor on the road because there are no mudguards on them. They are used in the farmyard yet the Minister wants farmers to tax them. He also wants to tax off-road dumpers.

I met a builder from Dublin last week who has no work but when he gets a job he needs to use his vehicle to load equipment. I want a system brought in, for which I have lobbied, and on which I intend to table an amendment to the Bill, that will enable people to pay their motor tax by the month. This is especially important for lorry drivers, sole traders, road hauliers and those who have a combine harvester or a forest harvester. People with a combine harvester or a forest harvester were able to get a few months work but now they will only get ten days work I want a system brought in, similar to that which is in place in other countries, where people can pay their motor tax as they go. How can a sole trade driving a lorry pay €2,500 in respect of his lorry when he might not get two days this month, only get a month's work in May or June and no work in October, November and December? That is the reality. The people are going from pump to pump to get the cheapest fuel. A system whereby they can pay motor tax by the month should be included in the legislation. Are we interested in supporting business or are we trying to drive those people out of business?

Those are the types of people we are supposed to be supporting. With every initiative introduced since the Government came into office there has been talk of supporting small businesses. If it supported those in small businesses and left them alone such that they could hold what they have and take on one person, it would halve the unemployment rate, but those people have been hit with one regulation after another. Two years ago a van could not be taxed as a commercial vehicle unless one had a jackhammer and something else in the back of it; it was not enough to have a bottle of milk and one's child sitting in the front of it. That was a myth as well which has now disappeared. The septic tank charge was to be imposed to persecute every property holder in the country who were portrayed as dirty people which they are not. Thankfully, throughout my county there will be only 49 inspections and there will be probably fewer in Kerry. The Government frightened the lard out of the people with the introduction of that charge. It had to back off because it was nearly not going to get away with it. It cannot persecute people from rural Ireland, parts of Dublin and our towns and make them pay for the ineptitude of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government for having dozens of municipal plants in every county spewing sewage into our rivers and seas. The Minister of State knows that and I know that. That is what the EPA was going after and that is the reason it was doing so. The Government tried to create a smoke screen that it was the people of rural Ireland who were polluting the water.

We dealt with the Companies Bill last night which runs to 1,300 pages. It costs €109 to buy it. As I said, one would buy ten of Shane Ross's books and 15 of the late Maeve Binchy's books, God be good to her, and they would make for better reading. Who is going to read that lengthy Bill? It is cumbersome, anti-business, anti-work and anti-society. To beat it all, it can be decided that people who are overcharged will not be paid back because it is too complex to do so. It beggars belief that official Ireland has got away with so much that they think they can do this. They have taken everything away from us in the country.

Similarly in the case of the driver's licence, people were able to obtain a driver's licence in many councils on completion of the required form and payment of the required fee. We had a great relationship with the staff. Now that process is being done nationally. The Road Safety Authority wants its hands all over this to keep its people in jobs. I am talking about Noel Brett and the many other legions of officials. Gabh mo leithscéal. The Ceann Comhairle said that I should not mention names but I find it hard at times to get these people out of my mind because we see them so many times on television advertising something and so on. They are making a career out of putting misery on ordinary people.

This Bill is a shambles if we cannot put a system in place under it that will allow people to pay their motor tax as they go. People who have a combine harvester or a forest harvester use those machines at a maximum over a six-week season. Have they to tax them for the entire year? Why should they have to pay that level of tax? Issues like that are important. The next thing the Minister will want to tax is the milking machine. He taxed the hearse in the last budget. The shroud will be taxed next and for anyone who does not know what a shroud is, it is a piece of cloth people used to wear when they were being interred. Where will it stop? Tá an tAire ag gáire. He can laugh away but he knows how serious this issue is and I know how serious it is.

The biggest breach of faith of all, and it was referred to in the context of the changes we lobbied for in 2008, was when people took a leap of faith and bought a new low emissions car because they were less costly to tax but that deal is off. Those people have been blackguarded in the past two budgets. The tax on two and three year old cars has doubled and trebled.

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