Madam, – The Central Bank is going from one extreme to another. Having failed miserably to control our banks during the boom, it is now adopting an ultra conservative approach in an effort to convince the international financial community we are sorting out our problems.
Prof Patrick Honohan is a good man and well-intentioned, but unfortunately naive or misguided. The economy of this country is now so intrinsically tied into our banks that outside investors will just see this as shifting a burden from one section of the economy to another. There will be very little appetite among outsiders to put money into our banks until we have a minimum of one if not two years of successive growth in GDP. Hope springs eternal! – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I am writing to you in anger and total disgust at the way the Government is squandering taxpayers’ money. Who gave it the right to bail out the banks? Last week we also had the fiasco of the Moriarty tribunal, after which it is unlikely anyone will be jailed, despite millions of our money being paid to the legal profession.
I do not mind paying high taxes if spent on health care, education and other essential public services, but not to greedy bankers and corrupt politicians as well as over-paid judges and lawyers.
For years we have stood idly by and let the ruling elite get away with this. Enough is enough.
I am an OAP and allegedly owe the tax authorities some money. I am refusing to pay because I can see it as the only protest I can make as an individual. But I cannot do this alone, I need the support of others. Alone I am virtually powerless.
What I am proposing is a campaign of civil disobedience, in which we refuse to give the Government any more of our money to squander. If enough of us refuse to pay income tax, car tax, VAT and other revenues the Government might be brought to its senses.
It cannot jail all of us. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – So the Republic, given the extraordinary financial crisis it finds itself in, would not exist as a functioning entity if it were not for our European colleagues and the IMF bailout of the State. One thus has to ask, if the Republic never joined the EMU would the mess be as big? One would have to strongly think not. Yes, the entry into the EU and then the EMU provided us with enormous benefits – financial, infrastructural and social. But we are now seeing the true price of joining the EU “party”. Was the “high” worth it? If only we had been as wise as some of the Nordic countries or, whisper it, our nearest neighbour to the east. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I feel it is appropriate for our Government to spell out exactly our current debt position and its plan to manage this.
I am happy to pay more taxes to deal with this problem, but as citizens and taxpayers we need a clear and understandable message to explain it to us.
This should be presented in simple language and in a manner understandable by the majority. We need to know how much we owe, who we owe it to, how much of it is principal and how much interest and what is the plan to pay it back. A short and simple booklet available to all citizens would go a long way to easing our worries and anxieties. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – It seems the current mantra of burden sharing and burning the bondholders is successfully distracting us from the real problems. What we need now is burden-sharing at home. We need an equitable and fair contribution from those who can afford it, those who gained enormously during the Celtic Tiger years: the landowners, property owners, estate agents, the legal profession, etc. We must remember that the money hasn’t gone away you know. Some of it may be now with property owners in London, New York and Bucharest, but a large proportion of it is still in Irish hands. Every loan issued by the Irish banks ended up in somebody’s bank account.
We can only achieve burden-sharing through progressive property tax and/or wealth tax. Burning bondholders will make no difference to the hard-pressed mortgage holder who is having to service a hugely inflated mortgage over the next 30 years, while the developer in a similar situation has had his problem solved by Nama. When are we going to see developers face bankruptcy – a prospect which is facing many small mortgage-holders.
This orchestrated call for burden-sharing is popular while it affects only German banks, but not when it applies at home. – Yours, etc,