Fergal abandons Georgian Dublin !
My friend Fergal- a member of the “self-employed- professional” class, you understand - the chaps who safeguard Georgian Dublin by actually occupying the properties - has handed in his notice and will move to the suburbs. He says he’s fed up with the way the bureaufatcrats in Dublin City Council keep jacking up the taxes. They went up again by 25% during Mr. Cowan’s “give-away” budget speech recently. Well how did that actually happen, I ask him?
Fergal pays c. 12 grand for his two rooms - twice as much as he would pay in Brussels, for example- and another grand for rates, annually. That’s a tax payable to the City. So is the five grand per annum which it costs him to park his car on the street, within walking distance of his office. (He has to earn nearly eight grand before tax to pay that !- a quarter of the national average industrial wage !). Then, during budget week, the city chaps just reclassified his street for parking, turning it from red to yellow or whatever, and thereby raised the parking tax on Fergal to €6250 per annum. Add rates and that’s like nearly 70% tax on top of rent ! Twice Brussels, again.
Of course these high taxes are needed to fund the Free Parking which these City Bureaufatcrats enjoy under their city offices (- parking Not for visitors, mind you, only for elite staff of the Council). The value of that benefit-in-kind has just gone up 25%, but do you think they’d be paying tax on the benefit?…you’ve gotta be joking, even the Revenue lads themselves have free parking….No, taxes are for small professional classes, the idiots who maintain our lovely Georgian Dublin. The idea that they might even deserve some form of parking disc, for rate-paying tenants- wouldn’t occur to an abusive City government.