Household Tax is Highway Robbery
Minister Phil Hogan visited Limerick last Friday, and was confronted by a masked robber who exclaimed: “Stand and Deliver: Household Tax, Highway Robbery!” The protest, organised by the Limerick branch of the Campaign Against Household & Water Taxes got great media coverage locally and nationally, and ensured Hogan’s didn’t go unchallenged on his trip to Limerick.
Like the masked highwaymen of the past, “Big Phil” Hogan is trying to extort money by threats and obstruction. But rather than taking from the ric h stage-coach owners of the past, Mr Hogan is demanding ordinary families stand and deliver €100 by March 31st in the form of his new Household Tax.
And if you don’t deliver he may not threaten your life but he is promising to make life for the 750,000 people in this country who have to get by on less than €70 a month very difficult indeed.
These taxes and threats are an outrage. The Household Tax is just another attempt by the establishment to make ordinary people pay for the crisis. It is the latest in a long line of austerity measures that are aimed at picking the pockets of the broad mass of people in society, while yet another unsecured bondholder in Anglo Irish Bank will receive over a billion euro in taxpayers’ money this week.
We in the Campaign against the Household Tax call on everyone to snub this unjust and inequitable tax. Those who want to rob you of €100 today will be back for thousands of euro in water and property taxes in the coming years. If enough households simply refuse to register and refuse to pay, the government would be unable to track non-payers and implement this bankers’ tax.
That’s why we’re calling on people to support the Campaign, to find out more and get involved. On Monday 30th January there will be mass rally held in the Clarion Hotel where householders can come to show their opposition to the tax and hear the facts the government don’t want us to know! Despite the government’s scaremongering, still only less than 3% have registered for the Household Tax so far with over 97% still not paying – the people here today standing up to Minister Hogan are part of that 97%!
