David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House but I do so as a formality because I cannot welcome what he has said here. This is a loathsome, vicious and immoral tax. I oppose the entire idea and I note that even the Minister himself acknowledges in his contribution that this was imposed upon us by foreigners.

There are a number of extremely regrettable aspects to this tax and I will try to list some of them. It has just been said that this is to be seen as a kind of local tax but I do not believe that for one minute. Let us put this clearly. We are now paying for our bin collection, which used to be a function of the local authority. We will be paying for our water, which used to be free, and we are paying substantially increased rates of motor tax, which pays for the roads, so there is not an awful lot left. We are paying for more of the services that were originally paid for out of rateable valuation and so on. Let us not parade this as some kind of equitable local tax because it is not and cannot be seen as such.

This was imposed on us by a gang of foreigners. We did not come up with this bright idea ourselves. I am not particularly interested in the ping-pong between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil as to which is responsible; I do not care a damn. It is wrong and immoral. This is taxing our homes. I tried to get the Government to introduce a section on home protection but it did not do so. Successive governments have failed to protect the homes of the people of Ireland. The Minister of State is aware of this, and may even be in that situation, because I do not think we are all that grossly overpaid after all these cuts and so on. I am sure he has constituents who simply cannot pay. What will happen then? Will the Government try to squeeze blood from a stone?

A nasty aspect of this is that we have brought in the Revenue Commissioners. One is not even allowed the opportunity to refuse to pay, to go to court and so on. The Revenue Commissioners will simply bloodsuck it out of one's income at source, if it can, or defray it from one's bank account. It will have powers of attachment and so on.

Prudent people who looked after and improved their houses will get another smack. Each week in this House I listen to reasons not to celebrate 1916. We have evictions, soup kitchens, rank-renting, informers - because we are being told that people who buy houses must inform on the people from whom they purchased them, and apparently some kind of spy in the sky, which I would like the Minister of State to clarify. Is Google Earth or a helicopter being used? It is absolutely indecent. It really is Big Brother, and I certainly object to it.

I am very surprised people would prefer this kind of tax to income tax because at least with income tax, one can evaluate the people who are capable of paying. I do not mind paying more income tax - in fact, I would welcome it. That is from where the State should be funded. It should be centrally funded by taxation.

How on earth can one gauge or assess the value of a property? The value of a property is notional; it does not exist until it is sold and it could be sold on different days for remarkably different values. At auction, for example, one could be lucky one day to have two people bidding against each other. If they have developed an irrational desire to possess a particular house, then the price could go through the roof but the unfortunate person who, in one sense, is the recipient of a windfall of good luck is penalised and treated as a criminal because he or she is told he or she undervalued the house. It is almost like the Nazis in that one has to pay for one's own execution. One has to value one's own house but there is no way of knowing how to do that. I can tell the Minister of State one way to do so, which would be quite accurate, but nobody has thought of it except on the little island of Cyprus. It is to take the valuation at the time the house is bought and add in a multiplier based on the number of years since that time and the variations in property values. One would then get a real price. Why should people be penalised for improving their houses or for building extensions?

I bought my house in a very dilapidated area and got involved in the whole preservation scheme and the start of the North Great George's Street Preservation Society. I spent the last 30 years or so restoring the house, one room per year. As a prudent person who was involved in the objectives of the State in restoring a historic building - through the negligence of the State the whole street had been allowed to disintegrate - apparently, I will now be whacked because it will be seen as a prime property. Some years ago, it was on television and I suddenly got tax demands for furniture and stuff. It is unbelievable what is going on in this country. It is a load of nonsense.

I have tabled an amendment to the effect that listed buildings of historic and architectural value and so on within areas of special conservation should get an exemption. There are exemptions, which are all nice - the girl guides' and the boy's scouts' dens and so on. They are all rubbish. There are pages of drivel about this in the explanatory memorandum, as if it mattered a damn. The only exemption worth anything is the pyrite one, which was first brought up in this House, but of course the leader of the Minister of State's party is determined to abolish it if he can fool the people. The Government is very coy about the rationale of the Bill, yet there is all this stuff about the exemptions, of which there are really very few.

Then there is the question of deferral. The Minister of State understands the suffering of the people but the idea of deferral is obnoxious in the extreme because people already have severe mental health problems because of the debts they are under. If one proposes to defer, it is only an overhang - in other words, they will never get out of it. Again, we seem to be punishing the prudent people.

I will vote against the Bill and I hope that what was said by Senator Conway - that it will never be revoked - is not true. Will Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, which might well form a coalition the next time, revoke this Bill? I would like to know the truth. They should not fart around and say it is not the right time and so on. Everybody will say it is never the right time to introduce a tax but it is certainly never the right time to introduce an unfair, unjust, immoral and partial tax which punishes people who have behaved well and produces a lot of silly-----