Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The issue with rates in the North is that people get services for those rates. When this was introduced the Taoiseach promised that 80% of the money collected through the property tax would go to support local services. Last week he reneged on that promise. People will not get any benefit in local services by paying this very unfair tax. This is the first admission that the Taoiseach knew this. Did the Tánaiste not know it? Did the Tánaiste not see the letter? Did the Tánaiste not know what was coming? Why did the Tánaiste then ask for the deadline to be relaxed? Why has the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, a member of the Government party, called the Revenue Commissioners in to explain all of this? This is the Taoiseach's law and his tax. Once again, it is austerity, austerity, austerity. I ask the Taoiseach for a yes-or-no answer. Will he not now acknowledge that austerity is designed to run down wages, to do away with social protections, to do away with the social and economic rights of citizens? Will he not now accept that austerity is wrong, unjust and unfair?

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