Flawed analysis adds fuel to city versus country fire

I’m not sure how many saw a 20-minute segment of a recent Prime Time programme claiming that huge amounts of Dublin-generated Local Property Taxes (LPT) are being transferred to rural county councils.

The programme was based on a most infuriating and simplistic analysis wrapped in what the producer probably thought was a neat bit of juxtapositioning, suggesting that chunks of the LPT being collected in Dundrum, Dublin, are being transferred directly to Dundrum in Tipperary. And who was wheeled out to defend rural Ireland, but Mattie McGrath.

A vox pop recorded in both Dundrums was appalling in terms of its disingenuity. Shoppers on the street in Dublin’s Dundrum were asked if they were happy their Local Property Tax was going to support their country cousins in Tipperary. RTE knows very well that presenting the issue in this way is fundamentally flawed.

Of course, it is well-known that calling the property tax a ‘local’ tax is a misnomer. Like all taxes collected in this highly-centralised country, the LPT is accounted for in the context of the national pot and is used to plug whatever hole needs plugging.

Each of the councils has to account for where every cent is used to the Local Government Department.

The titles given to most taxes are incidental at best and misleading at worst. Even motor tax, which is supposed to be used for roads, goes into a central pot and not necessarily into potholes.

The real issue here is that we don’t have genuine local government. Aside from rates, there is no other real tax collected locally. To say property tax collected in Dublin should be kept in Dublin is like a farmer insisting that the milk he supplies to the co-op should be the only milk sold in his locality.

But let’s take at face value the argument made by RTE’s Prime Time team; that Josephine Soap in leafy Dublin Dundrum with a €500,000 house is paying €803 per annum, while Siobhán McSoap in the Premier Dundrum in an equivalent house, but valued at €250,000, is paying €445. On the face of it, thanks to every Josephine Soap with a €500,000 house in its area, the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is €358 per house better off than the council in Tipp. But, if this argument is followed through, Josephine and her Dublin friends should be horrified to hear that much of the handsome taxes generated by their valuable Dublin dwellings are sent straight to Siobhán and her pals in Tipperary.

If Siobhán in Tipperary were to sit down and do her sums, she might be glad of the few euro coming from the Dublin cousins. I know something about Siobhán’s situation. I was at home last week tapping away at the keyboard in my rural idyll, wondering if the broadband speed would move up a gear from snail-pace to tortoise gallop. I took a break from the frustration and strolled out to the post box at the gate to check the post. Among the envelopes waiting for me was a service agreement from the company providing the sewerage treatment system for the house. The pleasure of signing this agreement will cost me €235, the annual service itself will cost at least another €200, all things being equal and unbroken.

I sat down to my desk potentially €235 worse off when a bleep from my phone reminded me to contact the local water treatment provider to get a quote for a treatment system for the private well that supplies the house with water. By the time I had all that done, my €135 per month broadband service had decided to take a long and undeserved rest — nowhere in the field of information technology is so little delivered for so much.

Oh, and I forgot to add I had to move out of my office to a corner of the house that has a flicker of a mobile phone signal.

You see, a €475 device designed to boost the signal decided to take an extended holiday with the result that I now go around the house holding the phone aloft trying