Ireland's Boston Tea Party Reaches US News

Ireland's revolt against the imposition of further Austerity measures reaches US news media. 

Background to story

The Household tax, was a tax described as "immoral" by current Taoiseach Enda Kenny in 1994 when his party, Fine Gael, were in opposition.  Now in power, Kenny is trying to implement the tax.

The campaign against the Household Tax and further austerity from the EU is one organised by the ordinary decent citizens of Ireland on ground level. It's been described as a grass-roots campaign. With basic resources, the campaign has grown to reach every community of Ireland. This culminated in the successful mass non-payment of the recent Household Tax by approximately 50% of the population.  It is not a refusal to pay tax per-Se, but a refusal to bail out the financial institutions who are seen as being a fundamental cause of the current financial turmoil.   

A transcription of the NPR radio broadcast is  available below.

The radio broadcast and original transcription can be found here.

Now in power, Fine Gael have tried to implement a household tax.  In 1994 (below) they called such a tax immoral.  Only 50% of the Irish population have paid before the deadline.

May 22, 2012 - ORIGINAL NPR BROADCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Anti-Austerity Movement Sweeps Ireland

by Philip Reeves

A mass tax revolt is under way in Ireland, and hundreds of thousands of people have resolved to break the law and refuse to pay a newly-introduced levy on households. The tax is $125 a year, but protesters say it could lead to larger property taxes in the future.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
In Europe, opposition to austerity is spreading. In Ireland, the government has been slashing spending and raising taxes as part of a deal with the E.U. and International Monetary Fund to get a massive bailout. For a while, the Irish seemed to accept their fate - take their medicine.
But as NPR's Philip Reeves reports, now some are having second thoughts.

PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Eileen Gabbett is a retired prison officer. She spent her career enforcing the law. Now she's breaking it.

EILEEN GABBETT: Civil disobedience is a big thing. Especially coming from the background of been working in the prison service and paid by the state.

REEVES: The Irish government recently introduced a new Household Tax. Gabbett's struggling to live on a shrinking pension. She objects to being asked to make another sacrifice.

GABBETT: Oh, I won't pay it. No, no. Absolutely not.

REEVES: Gabbett's among a multitude of Irish people who are boycotting the new tax.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

REEVES: They've held protests around the country. The tax is only about $125 a year, yet these protestors know that's just for starters. Collecting this money will allow Ireland's government to gather the data it needs to impose significantly larger property taxes in the future. That's one reason why so many people have decided not to pay.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

REEVES: European officials have heaped praise on Ireland for compliantly applying an austerity program prescribed by the E.U. and the IMF. They call Ireland the eurozone's poster child. Many Irish see things differently. They see a big spike in unemployment, mass migration, a huge property crash, and cuts in pay and pensions. They're angry about fat-cat politicians and bankers.

Gabbett believes the Household Tax won't help Irish people - but will be used to pay off foreign bondholders. She's unhappy that Ireland's had to cede economic sovereignty to Brussels and Berlin.

GABBETT: I actually feel so emotional about it. I will cry even thinking of the fact that someone could come in here and tell us how to run - we're only a small little country. We were sold out for our souls.

REEVES: Ireland's government says there are some 1.6 million households in Ireland. They were all supposed to register and pay the new tax by the end of March. Nearly half of them still haven't done so. That makes this the biggest tax revolt in decades.

This month that sovereignty issue will come to a head. The Irish will vote in a referendum on a European treaty imposing strict budgetary rules on eurozone nations. The referendum's being seen as a crucial moment in Ireland's relationship with Europe.

(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHATTER)

REEVES: A group of pensioners and local business folk mill around the tiny vacant shop that serves as their campaign headquarters in the town of Athlone. They say they're ordinary folk who never usually break the law.

GORDON HUDSON: I have no political background. No party political connections. But I have gone out. I have put up posters at 11:00, 12:00 at night. I done rallies, and I definitely think we will make a huge difference.

REEVES: Gordon Hudson's chairman of Athlone's campaign against the Household Tax. Ireland's crash wiped out his business and left him struggling to pay the mortgage on a house worth about a third of what he paid for it.

HUDSON: People now are starting to stand up and fight. They're not going to take it anymore.

REEVES: The other day Ireland's Taoiseach, or prime minister, Enda Kenny, swept into Athlone for a meet-and-greet at a shopping center. Hudson and his fellow Household Tax refuseniks were ready and waiting. The prime minister found himself under fire from Paedar Doyle, a local shop owner.

PAEDAR DOYLE: You tell me I'm breaking the law or whether I'm not breaking the law.

ENDA KENNY: You are actually, yeah.

DOYLE: Yeah. Whether I am breaking the law, I don't mind.

KENNY: You don't mind?

DOYLE: No. Because I paid 60,000 in taxes.

REEVES: Doyle tackled Kenny on that sovereignty issue.

DOYLE: And I will not be sold to the Germans.

KENNY: You will not be sold to anybody. We will have to stand on our own two feet.

DOYLE: Well, then in that case, get out and do not let Angela Merkel shrink our economy any more.

PAUL MCSWEENEY: In a time of austerity such as we have in Ireland now, nobody wants to pay a new tax. But unfortunately we have to do it. Pave roads, we need lights to be switched on, we need water to run. All of these services have to be provided.

REEVES: Paul McSweeney heads the Local Government Management Agency. That's the body tasked by the Irish government with collecting the Household Tax. McSweeney believes most people in Ireland don't want to break the law. He thinks the boycott will eventually fade away. The refuseniks of Athlone beg to differ.
For Anne Hennehan, who runs a bed and breakfast, Ireland's tax revolt is a matter of principle.
How far are you prepared to go though?

ANNE HENNEHAN: Prison. I am dead serious.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All of us are. Yeah, we're not afraid.

REEVES: Philip Reeves, NPR News.

Bruce Arnold's argument in the Irish Independent last week about why we might vote no in the upcoming referendum is the best I have yet read. I thought it was so good that I would share it here

Bruce Arnold: Only a No vote will save us from the begging bowl

Monday May 21st 2012

Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and Ireland are the foremost EU/eurozone countries requiring amendments in the crisis measures they face. Germany is blocking them. We support Germany. By holding firm the EU aims to impose huge further financial burdens on eurozone countries through the ESM treaty and the amending Article 136.
The referendum empowers a threshold treaty, arguably illegally under our Constitution and law, and makes way for the European Stability Mechanism, together with the Article 136 TFEU amendment to the EU treaties, effectively, in sovereignty terms, sealing our fate.
This ESM treaty, more pernicious than the fiscal compact treaty, is being passed by simple Dail majority and -- if we believe Mr Noonan and Mr Bruton -- is because the begging bowl held out for more money will be left empty if we do not co-operate with the EU.
This makes the begging bowl the central expression of government policy. It will dictate our future lives through our part in the colossal funding of more resources for the bankrupt EU and for the banking system it is propping up because it knows no other way.
These Government commitments put us permanently in the hands of an organisation that will take over the amending of present and future EU laws and treaties, doing so under no democratic control at all. How, then, can we trust it?
The energies that once comprised Ireland's sovereignty will be engaged in paying colossal financial dues to the stability mechanism. If we vote Yes to the fiscal compact treaty, we open ourselves to this surrender of sovereignty. The begging bowl becomes our way forward.
The European Stability Mechanism is above the law. In due course, it is as likely as every other failed solution to help bankrupt the eurozone and will do nothing to solve Europe's economic crisis. This is its unaccountability under Article 32 of its proposed structure: "The ESM, its property, funding and assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process except to the extent that the ESM expressly waives its immunity ... "
This is oligarchy without any oligarchs. Its creation represents a new level of control that will allow its contravention of treaties we once agreed were sacrosanct. That basic idea in European law has been trampled in the mud.
The Government, in respect of these developments, is trying to find truth in that mud and in the possibility that further debased coinage can be rescued from it while at the same time democracy drowns in it.
These issues should be put to the people by referendum. They are more serious than any EU referendum that has gone before and the confining of the present referendum to the preliminary threshold event of ratifying the fiscal compact is simply an absurdity. It is like putting a plug into a vessel before filling it with a poison that will destroy us, the balance of toxic matter becoming fatal.
I referred to other countries in trouble meeting EU conditions. The odd addition is France and its new president, Francois Hollande, with whom Enda Kenny initiated friendly relations, seeing him as some kind of companion. Yet the French president's objectives are European tax harmonisation, which will drain jobs from Ireland and other member states currently benefiting from essential tax competition. Weakening tax competitors will give Mr Hollande a temporary investment boost as those jobs shift location to the centres of population and rail distribution in Europe. Mr Hollande wants to introduce a financial transactions tax from which the IFSC will suffer. Nevertheless, Francois Hollande and his finance minister intend to renegotiate the treaty. If him, why not us?
Recklessly, we are giving away the farm without knowing the new deal. And the new deal is not just for France. Greece is fighting for its survival in the euro, Spain and Portugal are fighting for the same.
We have thrown in the towel and the Government is taking the begging-bowl stance as an expression of policy.
Are there alternatives? Declan Ganley's re-entry, espousing a No vote, bases his case on positive objectives, the first of which is his stated belief that Europe's insolvency, which is fuelling the draconian new laws and systems, should inspire a true federal democratic union to replace the totalitarian system of government no longer answerable to the people. It is now a joke remembering the claims once made by leading MEPs about their share in the European democratic mandate. Powerlessly, they participate in a wake.
We should not want to see Greece, the most perilously placed state in the eurozone, being coerced into laws it can't keep and then being threatened. That is a recipe for break-up.
Ganley's suggestions remind us of the distant days when we joined the EEC. This should inspire widespread hesitation over the course we are now on. He suggests regulating and purging financial institutions that are the holes through which vast amounts of money are draining away under EU leadership protection. State debts, he believes, should be federalised under an EU federal government. The present approach is un-monitored and authoritarian as well as being based on austerity. And it is creating the unworkable disparities between the strong economies and the weak ones, with Greece on the further edge of this frozen situation.
Ganley's belief, which I share, includes the issuing of a European Union bond to finance the needs of a new Federal Union government as well as individual states.
Member states will be free to borrow directly from the markets on the understanding that they could be forced into bankruptcy, full losses incurred by lenders, if they fail to meet repayment terms.
He also proposes the key objective of creating a workable democracy in Europe -- at present it has none at all -- by merging the two positions of president of the European Commission and president of the European Council into one officeholder directly elected. This president would serve for one six-year-term only, and would be chief executive in the same manner as the president of the United States.
The EU Commission, which has failed to govern or safeguard, would become the servant of the executive arm, its members nominated by the democratically elected president, and ratified by a new upper house of the European Parliament.
"We are now," Ganley says, "in the midst of the modern historic era's third attempt to unite Europe, Napoleon being the first, and Hitler being the second. This latest attempt, for the first time founded to achieve noble and peaceful aims, should be given the chance to succeed but only on condition that it subjects itself now to democratic accountability, lest it depart on a road to something far less bearable."
That is why we should be voting No in a fortnight's time, so that we can retain a more powerful voice instead of becoming no more than carriers of a begging bowl.

Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!

In 1910, Dubliner Robert Tressell wrote... "The present system means joyless drudgery, semi-starvation, rags and premature death; and they vote for it and uphold it. Let them have what they vote for! Let them drudge and let them starve!"

We now find ourselves facing the same situation that the workers portrayed in Tressel's novel faced - voting for a system which we perceive to be maintaining our well-being and order, but which in fact is completely indifferent to us.  As a result we are faced with the prospect of voluntarily handing back the rights, which those before us fought to attain (as limited as they were); and we are now under the illusion that we will be better-off without them.

I believe our concept of what the Irish State should be became blurred as a result of the Civil War and the political platonification during the War of Independence and the failed Easter Rising.  

In 1916 and afterwards, what kind of Republic Ireland might be was forgotten in the struggle to fight against British occupation. Arthur Griffith 'affirmed that "they elected us not as doctrinaire Republicans, but as men looking for freedom and independence"'. '...At whatever cost to ideological coherence, untiy had to be preseved and divisive issues avoided'.

Although we celebrate the Easter Rising, its principles are something which much of the population of Ireland today either don't recognise, undervalue or would not support - exactly as the people of Ireland felt in 1916.

Today we are faced with the prospect, that the rights which these people fought for  are being handed back, not solely by the politicians, but by the Irish People.

Today, although the drudgery and starvation of Tressell's characters may not be common place, it is occurring at a much more frequent rate.   What is prevalent, is an increasing sacrifice of our limited freedom for which the most we can hope for is a return to 'stability' in the markets.

Business-Leaders As Thought-Leaders: How It Affects Our Democratic Decisions

Often, I see success and financial wealth confused by people as being one and the same thing. I believe there is a distraction from credible sources of knowledge that is gained by academics & scientists in place of the interests of business leaders which are often opposing.

Richard Dawkins has shown how some elements of society are blind to rational thought through their religious beliefs - it is thought the same distraction occurs through the portrayal and citing of business leaders as authoritative sources on important democratic decisions.

I exact that this is a dangerous frame of mind, and one of the thought processes encouraged by conservative and neo-liberal politicians, especially in the past few years.  I feel this is one of the thought processes of those who campaign for a yes vote in the upcoming referendum in Ireland on the Fiscal Stability Treaty.

There exists a frame of mind which equates earning power through business as something to aspire towards, and if you cannot achieve this, the next best thing appears to be to respect those that do. To earn financial wealth requires the initial financial means, the time, dedication and the will to do so. It requires confidence, along with an ability to sell something, whether it's of value or not - as long as you can illustrate a value effectively.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of ambition as long as the kind of people who achieve such financial success do not become thought leaders in our society.

But this is not the case.  Most of our greatest academics, intellectuals, artists, activists, scientists and so on, are not wealthy in relative terms.  To achieve success in their fields, these individuals too require time and dedication to their discipline, but it comes at the expense of financial wealth and a public profile.  Ironically however, these are the individuals whose thoughts we might prioritise.

A college lecturer may be belittled by those in a position of power, and overlooked in turn by the media when it comes to issues of political importance (we can see this kind of business machoism - the "I earn more than you" argument, in the video below).  The fact that mass media often overlook such knowledgeable sources is not a new claim and has been researched perhaps most notably by Chomsky in his illustration of the Five Filters of Mass Media and occurs for many reasons.

This distraction away from facts and more pertinent and long term issues has been particularly evident in the debate about the existence of global warming during the Bush administration years between conservatives and the scientific community.  Admitting global warming was a serious issue, or an issue at all would have been detrimental to the US economy, in the eyes of the Bush administration (See here)

An example of the portrayal of successful business people as thought leaders in Ireland, was during the last Referendum, for the Lisbon Treaty, where two businessmen, Michael O Leary and Declan Ganley, received a prime time slot on RTE, Ireland's state broadcaster.  O'Leary may have been seen as the dominant figure on the occasion due to his boasts of being a more successful business person.








Even if "self-interest" was not the only motivator that these business leaders had in this debate, the fact that self-interest existed at all, should discredit their arguments; hence their opinion should not be a trustworthy source.

The meaning of the socialist-liberal revolutions in Europe and America have become warped so that freedom equates to the right for one to become disproportionately wealthy, at the expense of others, and to be worshipped for it. Because business leaders are not accountable and responsible to the electorate, they do not take the brunt of the blame for economic failings as elected representatives will.  Is it wise to reduce our sovereignty as citizens to further their interests?

The principles of the aforementioned revolutions promised to ensure the citizen's rights to personal freedom so that one might choose their own path in life whilst having the assurance of being protected from abuse of those in power through the safeguard of democratic processes.  For many, their chosen path is not a path to become powerfully rich.

The outcome of those horrific wars are now used as a justification of unrestricted freedom for those with means to become as wealthy and as powerful as possible.  These business leaders are obliged to compel those without the same means to subjugate themselves to the interests of the former, so that the latter might live relatively peaceful and convenient lives.  But as we are seeing in Europe, especially in Greece, there is a limit to this subjugation.