Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I accept the Minister's word that the position is as he has outlined, but the difficulty is that when the Taoiseach was challenged yesterday to state explicitly that this is the position, he declined to do so. According to a report in this morning's Irish Independent, a document that was prepared for the Economic Management Council suggests that councils in a number of local authority areas, including Dublin city, south Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow, Louth, Meath, Galway city, Kerry, Clare, Cork city and Cork county, would have been in a position to reduce the property tax but are now not in a position to do so because of the projected decrease in the central Government grant. People in those areas are going to lose out because of a squabble between the current Labour Party and Fine Gael.

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