Sir, - Talking of the 1960s and 1970s, Garrett Fitzgerald wrote (Opinion, August 18th), "Both politicians and people took it as a matter of course that as the country finally became more prosperous, the benefits of that prosperity should be shared by means of redistribution to the disadvantaged in our community . . ." and "resentment against higher taxes first began to emerge; not among the middle classes, who had shown a strong sense of social justice throughout this period, but in the form of a trade union-organised anti-tax march".
This is a serious misinterpretation of that period. Far from a golden age of social solidarity, this was a period of mass non-compliance and tax evasion by a large number of the propertied and professional classes and those with a largely cash-based source of income. This resulted in the ratcheting up to unsustainable levels of the rate of tax paid by compliant taxpayers, whether PAYE or self-employed.
During this period of high levels of inflation, the tax bands were not indexed, which resulted in people on very low incomes coming into the tax net for the first time, and those on modest incomes paying tax at the highest levels. The level of non-compliance was obvious, but measures to prevent it were lacking.
It was against this background that the tax protests took place. And at last in recent years, through the various tribunals, we are getting a true picture of the amount of revenue lost to the State.
The Right makes the excuse that the non-compliance only happened after the tax rates became so high. This lies behind the taxation policies of Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney who have preferred to deal with the problems of the rich before the problems of the poor.
The reality is that the culture of non-compliance goes back long before the 1960s and 1970s, and it was this that contributed to the very high levels of tax in that period and the 1980s. - Yours, etc.,
Mary E. Flynn, Brendan Road, Dublin 4.