John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. On a more general principle, I would love at some stage for us to have a fundamental root and branch look at the way we raise funds for the activities of our democracies. I am a social democrat at heart. I am a great believer in people who have more money paying more taxes than people who have less money and people that make more money making a bigger contribution than people who make less, but I am troubled by the way we assess rates in the first place, the whole idea that somebody puts an arbitrary value on one’s business or premises and assesses how much tax one should pay on that regardless of the income, turnover or revenue involved. Somebody could have a terribly loss-making business but because someone has arbitrarily and subjectively valued it as being valuable, the person concerned has to pay a large amount of tax. I just do not get it.

Will this section enhance or remove a part of the latticework of accountability which is so crucial in the way we spend public money? The trouble is that when one reduces levels of democracy one increases levels of bureaucracy and when one does that, bureaucracies tend to misidentify narrow sectional interests as in fact being public interests. For that reason, while we in Seanad Éireann believe very much in harmony, I am not so sure that harmonisation is its own end. I am not sure there is something particularly valuable about harmonising for the sake of harmonisation. The lack of accountability, the attempt to homogenise everything and the development of bureaucratic structures can lead to substantial pathologies. In one situation a large amount of public money, probably tens or hundreds of thousands, was spent by a body which had no local authority representatives on it, which it should have done, in pursuit of a cover-up of financial fraud. That was in St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group ten years ago when a large amount of public money was spent trying to defend the absurd contention that the hospital was not aware that a very large research programme existed, as it was the only way it could justify a very substantial and deliberate mis-billing of money from the Voluntary Health Insurance and other insurers. In the process it spent many tens of thousands of public money in pursuit of the cover-up. I am troubled by many aspects of the Bill and I hope that at some stage we can have a look at the way we raise the necessary revenues for our local authority activities.