Sinead Ryan – Notebook
Revenue isn’t just after your dosh, it wants your darkest secrets too
REVENUE has been busy creating an online portal so people can offload their bank accounts straight into tax coffers. Like the banks, it would prefer if you did all its work for it, so taxpayers must register online. In this regard, it takes security very seriously. VERY. Seriously.
While most organisations are satisfied asking you your date of birth and mother’s maiden name, Revenue has invented an arrestingly spirited set of questions before it’ll let you give it all your cash. They include the first album you bought, your first teacher’s name, favourite movie and first boss. This delve into our darkest secrets and guilty pleasures fills me with dread. My favourite film changes as George Clooney keeps making new ones, for instance.
Is my ‘first’ boss, the guy who felt me up on the back stairs of the office when I was a temp and who I’d really rather forget, or the hotel housekeeper who fired me for not cleaning the loos properly during my summer job? My fourth boss is my ‘favourite’, but not my ‘first’, which may be a breach of the rules. It’s bewildering.
While I’m reasonably confident of my children’s birthdays (another multiple-choice question), I’m uneasy that disclosing the fact ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was my first record might open me up to the prospect of civil servants gathered around a PC pointing and laughing. Better to opt for cool and put Bob Dylan, but since I find him wrist-slittingly boring, I’m sure to forget. Just take my money, Revenue, please! On the plus side, at least I’m old enough to understand the questions. What of the hi-tech twentysomething taxpayers who are left scratching their heads about what a ‘record’ is and why you would go to a ‘movie’ when you can download both for free?
Sinn Féin’s big stick
POOR beleaguered, misunderstood Sinn Féin. There it is, the party of peace and prosperity in our time, although firmly hurling from the ditch rather than getting on the pitch, and its ungrateful elected representatives don’t know what’s good for them. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one councillor may be unfortunate but two looks like carelessness. Both Seamus Morris and Lisa Marie Sheehy recently quit the party citing bullying, whispering campaigns, and harassment from party hierarchy. You’d almost feel sorry for them but for the fact that you’d wonder what on Earth they thought would happen joining a party where dissenting opinion is considered a shooting offence (metaphorically, of course). Surely if an organisation is robust enough in its beliefs, it welcomes all kinds of challenges to those views; but as the Catholic Church and North Korea have proven, it’s safer to keep dissenters in line with a big stick.
A small fortune is lost in translation
OPPORTUNITIES abound for anyone who got good marks in Leaving Cert Irish. It may be a dead language to the vast majority of us who never speak or use it, but political correctness has meant that the militant wing of na Gaeilgeoirí has tucked several triumphs into its belt recently, seeing millions of euro of taxpayers’ money disappear in the process.
In an effort to keep member states happy-clappy, the EU Parliament permits all documents to be translated into designated languages. If you’re Spanish, French or Latvian, this means that if a piece of research is written in German or English, then you get a copy for the millions of native speakers in your own country to read. Translators, employed privately by the parliament, get an average of €21.91 per page to do this work, which is nice for them.
However, Irish is in a league of its own. Not only are there hardly any native speakers here, even finding translators is proving a headache. The budget for translating reports over-ran by millions last year, and taxpayers are paying the few scribes it has a whopping €42 per page.
It gets worse. Now (taxpayerfunded) Fáilte Ireland has been ordered to retro-fit all the lovely metal signage along the Wild Atlantic Way (WAW) to ensure equal prominence for Irish on what are ‘bespoke artistic installations’, according to the organisation, and which will cost us €700,000.
Given the huge success of the WAW among tourists, surely it would be monumentally more beneficial to have the signs altered with spoken, living European languages instead?