GERRY MORIARTY VIEW FROM THE NORTH:THERE IS some bemusement in this and other Northern households at the degree of upset and agitation in the Republic at the €100 household charge.
In the North a £2,685.60 per annum domestic rates charge is applied at the upper level. That’s €3,221.
Northern Ireland never did what former taoiseach Jack Lynch did in 1977, abolish domestic rates.
So when we bought our first house here 20 years ago it was something of a shock to be landed with a rates bill on top of the normal taxes that didn’t seem any less onerous than what I was paying when working in Dublin.
In truth, it wasn’t much of a rates bill. After all the house in the Holyland in south Belfast cost us just £27,500 in 1992. That was during the “war” when if you had the speculative foresight you could have bought whole streets in certain parts of Belfast for relative buttons and cleaned up when the peace came.
But journalism and wise financial speculation don’t tend to mix, so we stayed put and didn’t move until the prices starting moving as well. And as they did the rates rose too.
So, just to provide Southern readers with a notion of what partition means for people in Northern Ireland, here’s a guide to the type of rates bills people in the North must pay based on the three properties we’ve lived in.
Properties in the Holyland are now valued at about £140,000 (€168,000) based on a revaluation programme carried out in 2005 – close to the height of the housing boom. So most rates bill are about £940 (€1,127) per annum.
We moved a short distance to Stranmillis in the mid-1990s where many properties for rating purposes are now valued at about £195,000 (€234,000). So the annual bill for local people is about £1,300 (€1,559).
Finally, with an expanding family and the absence of a garden, we moved to the Balmoral area of south Belfast. In the revaluation our house was reckoned to be worth over £400,000. But for rates purposes domestic valuations are capped at that figure and we were left with an annual bill of £2,685.60 (€3,221) – the same bill facing people living in properties worth £1 million and more.
In the meantime property values have nose-dived but there are no plans for rates to do the same. As one senior official said, rates are used to accrue a certain amount of money to help pay for refuse collections, bury the dead, fix roads and other services. “So even if there were a revaluation, in order to pay for public services rates would double if the price of houses halved,” as he helpfully explained.