Ahern is no artist struggling in a garret

If you have a well-paid job and if you’ve written a book about Irish politics you should pay tax on earnings from it

LIKE BERTIE Ahern, and a lot of other people, I have a non-fiction book in the shops at the moment. Ship of Foolshas sold reasonably well and unlike most of my literary masterpieces, it will probably generate a measurable profit.

Faced with this somewhat unfamiliar experience, I thought briefly about whether or not I should apply to the Revenue Commissioners to have this income exempted from tax on the grounds that the book is an "original and creative" work. Without venturing too far into the treacherous realms of immodesty, I think I could make a case that it has some element of both of those rather nebulous qualities. (The great Richard Brinsley Sheridan once told a young hopeful who had foisted a manuscript on him that the work in question was both original and creative, but that unfortunately the parts that were creative were not original and the parts that were original were not creative. On this definition, I could hold out some hope for myself.) And given the kind of book that is currently deemed to qualify under the scheme, there is a decent chance that my earnings from Ship of Foolswould indeed be exempt from tax.

Having thought about this for a few minutes, however, it quickly became obvious to me that it would be simply wrong to apply for the exemption. In the first place, it would not be in the spirit of a scheme that I actually believe to be of some importance. The point of the tax exemption should be to support art and scholarship, not just in terms of the production of individual works, but as a way of life. Its essential purpose is to recognise and honour the idea that Irish society is immensely enriched by the dedication of a relatively small number of people to a tough, and for the most part financially unrewarding, task of exploring images and ideas. Ship of Foolsis not, and does not pretend to be, a work of art. It is a political polemic.

And I am not a dedicated artist or scholar – I have a day job and a perfectly decent income.

Secondly, there is something particularly unpleasant about the idea of anyone making claims on the exchequer in relation to any work that relates to contemporary Irish politics or economics. Any such work, whether it deals in the currency of excoriation or of self-justification, is a form of literary ambulance chasing. It is, either consciously or by omission, engaged with a social disaster engendered by greed, selfishness and a lack of concern for the public good. And it is also part, for good or ill, of a public discourse whose evasions and illusions have resulted in real misery for real people. There is an element of guilt in making any money from this process. The most obvious way to assuage it is to pay the damned tax.

I’ve explained all of this not to claim the slightest credit. All I will be doing, after all, is what the vast majority of Irish workers have no choice but to do – pay tax on all their earnings. My point is simply that there is no real moral dilemma here. Neither the spirit of the legislation nor the spirit of the times leaves any room for doubt. If you’re not an artist, if you have a full-time well-paid job and if you’ve written a book about contemporary Irish politics or economics, you pay the tax. That goes for me and Shane Ross and Matt Cooper and any other journalist. It surely goes even more obviously for someone whose generous full-time salary is being funded by the taxpayer.

I genuinely can't understand, therefore, what thought process Bertie Ahern might have gone through before he decided to apply for tax-exemption on his earnings from his memoir, Bertie. Did he imagine himself for a moment as a struggling artist in a Drumcondra garret, or huddled with a notebook in a warm corner of Fagan's, hoping that the barman wouldn't notice that he had been eking out his one drink for hours? Did it occur to him that since he was on the public's payroll all the time he was working on the book, the taxpayer had already sufficiently subsidised the creation of his masterpiece? Did he see no irony in the statement in his book that "We may not have had much money, but we had a social capital that was beyond price"? How did he decide that the social capital of paying one's fair share of tax was actually not worth the price of having a little less money?

Even now, Bertie Ahern could do the State some service by asking himself these questions again. Paying the tax would draw just a little of the sting of rage and resentment. It would, at minimum, suggest an awareness that those toxic feelings are out there. And who knows but sales of Bertiemight be increased by the knowledge that at least a fraction of the profits were going to a good cause.