Another dollop of hardship

MOTHER of divine Jesus but is there going to be no end to it? Not a week goes by without another dollop of misery dropped on us. Last week, it was the old-age pensioners who were targetted for outstanding tax bills they never knew they owed. Who will it be this week?
We are at the end of our tether. For the past three years, we have had to carry the burden on behalf of get-rich-quick  gamblers who have brought the ordinary people of this country to their knees. And the likelihood is that a lot of us are going to carry that burden to our graves.
What more can they take off us? The chicken has been picked and the goat has been skinned. There is nothing left to pick or to skin. But they continue to fleece us as if we had fleece, while we have neither fleece, nor skin nor pickings any longer.
Meanwhile, those who brought all this down on us carry on as if nothing happened and that if anything did happen, they are not to blame. According to them, the rest of us had been living beyond our means during the years of the Celtic Tiger and now we must suffer.
Government spokesmen and their loyal supporters in the right-wing media were more concerned at the weekend about the public relations disaster than they were about the plight of the old-age pensioners caught in the income tax fiasco. They were not too bothered about the stress this caused to old people who still don’t know how they are going to pay their tax bill and survive. They were concerned about the timing of the letter sent out to old people by the Revenue Commissioners. They were also concerned about the political impact.  Some of them even blamed the old-age pensioners themselves for the fiasco and accused them of evading tax over the years.
Those people do not live in the real world. The vast majority of old-age pensioners – and I know a lot of them – paid their taxes on time over the long years of their working lives. They had no other choice under the PAYE system. It was done for them by their employers. If they did any bit of overtime, that was taxed too. They might not have understood the tax system too well. And if the system changed over the years, they might not have understood the changes. They didn’t have to. That, as I say, was all done for them. All they understood was what was in their pay slip at the end of each week and how much they paid in tax.
Then when they retired, they got their pension from their job along with their old-age pension. Their tax affairs continued to be administered by their pension provider. They presumed everything continued to be in order as it had been over the previous 40 or 50 years. They presumed the State knew they were in receipt of the old-age pension because it was the State that was paying that pension. They are not to blame for this fiasco and they should not have to suffer at the end of their days because it was the State and not them who made a total bags of the whole business. 
No one should suffer for the sins of others. But isn’t that the nub of the whole issue that has been driving so many people over the edge?
People cannot understand why they had to bail out the banks, who gambled and lost. I must correct myself there. They didn’t lose. That’s the kind of gambler we would all like to be. The one that never loses. I’d love to be able to put my money on a horse and be guaranteed that I couldn’t lose. That’s the banks for you. The horse might still be running but it is the ordinary people of this State – old-age pensioners, the poor, the sick, needy children, taxpayers – who are left to carry the burden.
Of course, the bankers, the politicians and the big develpers will grumble that they are also being forced to carry the can.
Well, I wouldn’t mind having their can to carry. Tell the next old-age pensioner you meet that Peter Southerland, Bertie Ahern and John Bruton have had to take a big cut in their pensions or salaries or fees or dividends and I’d advise you not to wait around to hear the reaction. What’s a big cut when your income is at least €200,000 or, maybe, even €500,000 a year? Could you survive on €10,000 or €20,000 less every year if your income was, say, €300,000 a year?  Could you not be well enough off on €280,000 a year instead? Well, you ask me. I, like the vast majority of Irish people, have no idea what it must be like to earn sums like those. 
But there are a lot of families in this country who are trying to get by on sums like €20,000 a year. So don’t ask them to have pity on Bertie Ahern or John Bruton.
The lowest paid TDs, (like the highest paid)have taken a cut but they are still paid three times the average industrial wage. That does not take account of the generous expenses, the foreign junkets and the other fantastic perks they award themselves.
Only this week, we discovered they are only going to make a token gesture towards cutting the number of TDs in the Dáil. We have 166 and for a small country like ours, we could do with less than half that number. We were promised before the election the number of seats in the Dáil would be reduced and we expected a real reduction.
Now we learn they are only going to reduce their number by about a half-dozen or so. Instead of 166 TDs, we are going to have 160 or perhaps 158 after the next election. Reform how are you!  Reminds me once again of turkeys not voting for Christmas.
When is it all going to stop? Is there anybody out there who is going to shout “Stop”.  I would like to say something to those who think they can do what they like to us. There is fight left in some of us still. Beware the risen people.