Roddy Collins writes for An Phoblacht

The Household Charge is ‘only’ €2 a week if you live in an ivory tower

ENDA KENNY makes me mad. His claim that the Household Charge is “only” Ř2 a week had me boiling. I have no problem with taxes - my problem is with unfair taxes and the unfair distribution of the burden.
The top 5% own 40% of the wealth but everyone gets hit with a flat-rate tax of €100. It’s unjust.
“Only” €2 a week is still €100 out of your pocket. If you’re on the money Enda and his advisers are getting (the Taoiseach gets €200,000 a year), it is “only” small change but to people in Cabra, where I grew up, and many other places, a hundred quid makes a difference.
A hundred quid still means a lot today. There are still people out there struggling badly. People living in the ivory towers have lost touch with reality and don’t appreciate the impact this sort of thing has on families worrying about how to pay bills and mortgages.
Can you imagine the response from almost any family if you’d knocked on their door in the run-up to Christmas or even now and said ‘Here’s €100 or here’s a food hamper for a hundred quid’? It would make a massive difference. It wouldn’t only be welcome but for an awful amount of people it would be necessary.
I can afford €100; Enda Kenny can afford €100; bankers can still afford €100; many people can’t.
Enda Kenny’s “only” €2 a week smacks to me of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake”.

Fostering prejudice

RIO HOGARTY’S ‘Beneath My Wings’ is the remarkable just-published story of an even more remarkable Dublin woman who, over her lifetime, opened her heart and small family home to 140 children, in addition to raising her own son and daughter.
Her lifetime of care for her children was recognised in 2010 when Rio was awarded Rehab ‘Mother of the Year’ when she was 75 years of age.
Ivan Yates spoiled an otherwise excellent interview with Rio recently on Newstalk radio with an aside that the €300-a-week foster parent allowance seemed “tasty”. Rio soon knocked that idea down fairly handy because foster parents have to account for that money and there’s food, clothes, school and college expenses and all the other costs that need to be taken care of.
But how bad was that, especially from someone still taking a state pension of 75 grand a year from the taxpayer as an ex-minister who’s still in a good job with a good earner on the radio? (What’s harder - presenting a radio show or raising kids?)
It shows the gulf there still is in some people’s thinking, and by people who should know better.
http://www.riohogartybook.com

Down in Dublin

HOMELESSNESS will be top of new ‘Super Junior’ Housing Minister Jan O’Sullivan’s agenda, she says. I hope it is because it’s a scandal.
I always try and give a few bob to people living on the streets not because I think I’m great but because I’m not as badly off as they are although I could so easily be. And I remember the hard times myself, my mother and my family have seen before.
This was brought home to me last month when I was walking up Talbot Street from Connolly Station.
I saw a guy sitting in a doorway so I stopped and gave him a couple of quid, shaking his hand to wish him well in the future, as I always do. He said to me: “I know you. I used to work with you.” Before I became a soccer manager I worked on the building sites and yer man was a contractor. His firm went bust when he wasn’t paid by people who owed him, depression turned to despair and he went on the drink seriously. He lost his wife, his family and his home.
It’s frightening how easily it can happen to people. To him, €2 certainly makes a difference.

Home and away

All Government ministers should have been made to take a trip to Dublin Airport the week before and the week after Christmas or the first week of the New Year.
I was at Dublin Airport with my wife in Christmas week and we saw the joy, the unbelievable happiness and emotion amongst families welcoming home sons and daughters, brothers and sisters and even mothers and fathers who have had to emigrate to make a living. It was brilliant.
The flip side of that, of course, is when they have to go away again — that wrenching apart of a family because of the mismanagement of the economy and the Government’s failure to create jobs.
It’s heart-breaking and ministers and their advisers and the bankers should be taken out on a big bus to Dublin Airport or Shannon and made to watch the exodus they are responsible for.
They need to start putting things right and creating jobs with some initiatives, especially for helping young people through apprenticeships and business start-ups. Then maybe the Government won’t be splitting up so many families by making them find a life abroad.