The weather didn’t suit the Australian rugby players on Tuesday evening but thankfully Munster gave us something to cheer about while the prospective loss of our economic sovereignty was hovering at the back of our minds. The long and the short is that we have made a complete mess of being a sovereign nation and while we can blame the politicians, the bankers, the Church, basically all the people we used to put faith in, the sad reality is that we all share the responsibility. We are the ones who elect politicians and we are the ones who lobby them to put parish pump politics ahead of the good of the country, naively believing that the satisfaction of our own greed will bring us security. Personal greed, and perhaps a neurotic fear of poverty, has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy. It has also prevented us developing a robust social conscience when it comes to paying taxes to ensure quality public services.
The black economy has started to thrive once more, it always happens during a recession and the basic reaction to the downturn seems to be that it is every man for himself and sure tax cheating is not a moral issue just a case of being clever. After all tax cheating has nothing to do with sick people on trollies in our hospitals or people suffering because they don’t have the services or supports they need, Mary Harney is to blame for that.
As a ‘sovereign’ nation we are masters at cheating on our taxes, mistakenly believing that the concept of tax is inherently unjust. Of course the difficulty with paying your taxes in Ireland is that the chance of their being used to provide support to the people who need it and not being diverted into some tax break to favour the rich is low. The tax is very likely to be wasted satisfying someone else’s greed.
Make no mistake about it though, there is still a lot of money in this economy: many toy shops were very busy last Saturday and try getting your local plumber or electrician to do a job for you and you will soon realise that he is busier than you thought. Makes you wonder about the official line that we are deep in recession.
In the last decade we have witnessed the fall of the Church through scandal and greed. Now we are witnessing the calling of a certain mindset into question, the cute hoorism, the parish pump politics, the mé féinism which must have the freedom fighters who gave their lives for our freedom turning in their graves.
The sad fact is we haven’t grown up and become responsible citizens; we are still in the throes of our adolescence, still preoccupied with our own needs and fighting authority figures.
If we are going to learn anything from this latest recession perhaps a new sense of citizenship will emerge where tax cheating is not only a crime but also taboo, so instead of the nod and the wink and the ‘fair play to ya’, the tax cheat in the future will be viewed as a social deviant.
We are at a turning point as a society; the childishness that we have embraced can no longer serve us as a country. It is time to grow up, stand for what we believe in, take responsibility for the mess we’re in, and work our way out of it. Pain is part of the solution - let’s all embrace it for the common good; all we ask is that the burden be shared by everyone according to their means. Surely that’s not too much to ask?
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