On March 1 the pension levy was imposed on all workers in the Civil Service, Local Authorities, HSE, VEC’s, non commercial semi state bodies, An Garda Siochána and the Defence Forces. Cllr Noel Frawley states that this is not a pension levy but rather a tax on workers wages to pay for our now deeply mortgaged country.
Cllr Frawley who is a public sector employee says that in reality this is the undiluted theft of workers wages precipitated by an increasingly totalitarian government operating policies resembling Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax era and using the public sector workers as scapegoats and justifying such actions with hypocrisy. When the people of this nation are asked to “take a little pain”, the pain must start at the top and work its way down to those who can least endure such pain. You don’t start the process by targeting our elderly and children; you don’t start by evoking a type of tribalism and pitching worker against worker [public against private sector] in order to nullify and splinter any unified revolt. These actions and their consequences have put the lid on any future partnership/wage agreements and have scattered to the four winds all respect and trust that had once existed between Government and the social partners.
Cllr Frawley finds it strange that workers in certain sectors of society have been exempt from this new tax namely RTÉ, VHI, Irish National Stud Company, Horse Racing Ireland, Dublin, Shannon and Cork airports and feels that some sectors of society seem to be more equal than others in the eyes of this Government.
With a one per cent levy on workers wages and now a new tax, masked as a pension levy imposed upon the public sector, it seems to indicate that the Government has little or no respect for a valuable intricate sector of Irish society. A sector which educates our children, protects our citizens in an increasingly dangerous society, cares for our sick and elderly and collects the taxes and revenues needed to run the country. Indeed the sector symbolise the virtual spokes on a wheel which keep things turning in an orderly manner, he said. Of all the comments Cllr Frawley was privy to when word broke that a Gulag type encrypted levy was about to descend on workers. One comment prevailed above all others, the fact that nobody trusted the present government and that although unpalatable, the time was right for a general election so that a new leadership with a mandate to tackle the present recession can take power and restore the ethos of an accountable government and regain the respect of its people.
