SLICING THROUGH THE SPIN EVERY MONDAY No more USC-less promises, Harris..
HATED FEE MUST BE DITCHED, NOT JUST ‘REDUCED’
THERE’S more than a touch of Back To The Future about our Taoiseach-to-be Simon ‘Hyper’ Harris.
Let’s start with him heading back to 2016 with reference in his Ard Fheis speech at the weekend to a very touchy subject for every worker in Ireland.
Without a sliver of embarrassment, he said he’d “continue to work to reduce the burden of the USC on low and middle-income earners”.
That’s really decent of you, Minister. But at the 2016 general election Fine Gael campaigned with a passion against the USC, with Leo Varadkar even posing beside a poster saying ‘We will abolish the USC’.
Vampire
Eight years later it’s still here — a vampire tax that seems impossible to kill off.
You really have to question Fine Gael’s competence or sincerity when you consider that — comparatively speaking — it’s taking longer to abolish the USC than it took to abolish slavery.
And it took then Health Minister Micheal Martin just a micro-second to abolish smoking in public places compared to the alleged abolition of the USC.
And sure Mary Harney took just a matter of minutes to abolish smoky coal — while free plastic supermarket bags were practically made extinct overnight in 2001.
But the USC’s here to stay it seems despite Leo Varadkar’s and Fine Gael’s 2016 election vow to abolish it, scrap it, eradicate it from the face of the planet, vaporise it as if it never existed.
Voters were swindled, duped, cheated and scammed back in 2016 to vote Fine Gael on the promise of abolishing the USC.
But Hyper Harris now has the gall to promise to continue reducing it — and whatever happened to “abolishing it”? — as if election promises are similar to Fr Dougal’s attitude to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
“Heaven and hell and everlasting life and all that type of thing. You’re not meant to take it seriously, Ted!”
And then there’s the new Taoiseach’s tone-deaf trumpeting of his vow to build 50,000 homes a year for the next five.
What about the last 13 years? This is a blunt admission of abject failure to build adequate housing over the last 13 years that Fine Gael’s been in government and the last eight years that Harris has been a Government minister. Why should we believe him now when his party has had years to fix the housing crisis — but we now have record levels of homelessness especially in Dublin?
Wand
Has Harry Potter Harris a magic wand maybe — and why didn’t he wave it when he was a senior Cabinet member?
And even if he manages to magically build 250,000 homes, it’s still not enough according to a leading housing expert who reckons we need 58,000 a year at least.
But it’s Hyper Harris’s pledge to up the Government’s game on law and order that really takes the barrel of biscuits.
“Under my leadership, Fine Gael will always stand for law and order. We stand for more Gardaí, with more powers and more resources to make our streets safe,” he said. Really?
But sure the streets are already safe — didn’t Justice Minister Helen McEntee tell us that last year after an attack on a tourist?
And Minister Paschal Donohoe and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar regaled us with lovely stories about wandering Dublin’s streets unmolested.
So were McEntee, Donohoe and Varadkar wrong, Simon?