Household Charge - Community Charge - Poll Tax

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Irish Government Communicates

New Law via the media

Gossip and Second-Hand Reports

The thought just struck me - do you believe all you read in the papers or that bit of gossip in the pub? If your only contact with the government is through these media, how are you to know what exactly the Household Charge is? It simply could be just a bit of idle gossip, and sure that would be best ignored.

Surely that is all it really is - gossip and hype, because no government - in it's right mind would utilise and depend on the gossip grapevine or the rumour mill to communicate with it's citizens, especially about something as potentially fraught and as important as a new and inequitable tax, a tax with a nasty sounding sting attached to it? One might say that that sort of thing is only practiced by dictators and totalitarian states - right?

How then is the recluse, who never listens to a radio or buys a paper, to know about this unfortunate and ill considered tax? Yet he or she will be penalised for not complying to a bit of gossip they might have accidentally picked up in a shop??

I have not had any government official call to my door nor a letter explaining this tax, nor a bill for the tax.

What I have heard discussed has impressed itself on me as being bully-boy and thuggish with suggestions as to how this new tax will seek out it's victims and will punish them if they do not immediately comply.

It is not the tax and the need to pay my fair share that annoys and sickens me, rather it is the inequity of a tax lacking any modifiers, and the ill considered and most unfortunate bully-boy approach that seems to have been adopted in a knee-jerk fashion by the government. I am not a naysayer, a knocker, a tax dodging opportunist, nor have I any political affiliation whatsoever. This is an inequitable tax which has been introduced in a most ham-fisted way.

I have never taken kindly to being bullied or threatened, either directly or by innuendo and gossip, my reaction is to dig the heels right in and fight back.  I suspect my reaction is a general Irish characteristic, one of a rebel people who have fought long and hard throughout history for their integrity.


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