New bin rates won’t solve the waste problem
SO it is finally acknowledged that the Irish tax system punishes ‘those who get up in the morning’, and the shiny new Finance Minister vows that this will be corrected.
Meanwhile, the Environment Minister announces a ‘new move’ to scrap flat-rate bin charges and permit waste disposal companies to offer a range of charging regimes.
What will this shiny new scheme add to that other than further complexity that a hard-pressed and over-taxed ‘those who get up in the morning’ already face? This new idea cannot possibly do anything for the environment because all it will do is cost the average family more. Why? Because the companies providing the services will have to make more money to cover the costs of the new legislation and its accompanying costs.
Of course, there are people in every community who contribute less than others. I pay motor tax for my car when my neighbour only ever takes the bus. My taxes pay for my local school when my children have long since been grown. That is how a society works and is the accepted norm, so what is different with annual bin charges from contractors and taxes from government?
We in Ireland have a growing problem with the disposal of our wastes. We have already run out of holes in the ground in which to bury them and are requisitioning land in which to bury more, yet we don’t apply the technologies that have existed to deal with the problem for a generation or more. We rail against incinerators that can generate useful electricity in burning wastes that have no other possible use, even if they are designed to the highest possible EU environmentally standards (and believe me, as a designer and operator of such plants I know just how strict those standards are), yet we are prepared to tolerate the catastrophic environmental damage that a landfill can cause for hundreds of years.
So what does our Environment Minister decide? To tinker around the edges of where the wastes are first produced and place the resolution to the problem on those who are worst placed to deal with it. ANTHONY MANSER, Faithlegg, Co. Waterford.
Seize dormant homes
THE Dormant Accounts Act was introduced to deal with the matter of dormant property (namely cash). Might I suggest that a similar approach be made to what appears to be a massive amount of unoccupied (‘dormant’) housing property.
Surely the constitutional property rights apply to both types of ‘property’, and proved not to be any legal deterrent in dealing with the cash type of property.
With a reported 200,000 or so unoccupied houses to choose from, it should be possible in principle to deal with the housing crisis very rapidly with a similar Act – at least to give time (five years, say) to actually build the required social houses – after which point the ‘dormant’ houses would revert for the use of their owners.
RJ CLOUGHLEY, Terenure, Dublin 6W.
Bruton’s wrong call
ON face value, the proposal by Education Minister Richard Bruton to end the ‘Baptism barrier’ sounds like an attempt to secularise Irish schools, but his plan, which can hardly be defined as fair, makes you wonder where the virtue of balanced thinking is gone when, while trying to end one form of discrimination he is creating a new one.
What would stop Minister Bruton from proposing to make it illegal for ‘all’ schools of ‘all’ denominations to discriminate in terms of admissions on the basis of religion rather than confining this rule to Catholic ethos schools only?
If the minister wishes to make a real contribution to the process of secularisation of Irish education, he could propose, for example, that religion as a subject in school should not be compulsory and offer students the option of another subject instead if they or their parents wished to. This is the case in other countries, including Italy where the Holy See of the Catholic Church resides. CONCETTO LA MALFA,
Dublin 4.