8 November 2001 Edition
Waterford Sinn Féin launches Anti-Toll campaign
BY ROISIN DE ROSA ([email protected])
Sinn Féin representatives from four counties, David Cullinane (Waterford), Kevin Dunphy (Kilkenny) and Councillors John Dwyer (Wexford) and Liam Walsh (Tipperary), joined together last Friday, 2 November to launch an anti toll campaign in Waterford City to oppose any proposed toll charges on the city's planned second river crossing. The campaign will start with a petition across the four counties concerned calling on the government not to introduce toll charges on the new bridge.
After a decade when motorists have endured wasted hours queuing to get across the one bridge into Waterford City, the planned second bridge will link to the new bypass and provide a 'gateway to the South East Region'.
"The trouble is," Sinn Féin people point out, "that you are going to have to pay at the gate, if the government, and Junior Minister of Finance, Martin Cullen, get their way."
Sinn Féin is set against the state's plan to use Public Private Partnerships to build roads. "It is a disgraceful economic strategy to which we are totally opposed," said John Dwyer, Sinn Féin councillor in New Ross, Wexford. He said it was not only an unfair tax on the ordinary motorist but would also represent an extra financial burden for haulage and transport companies.
"The Fianna Fáil PD coalition government has fallen unquestioning into the EU right wing agenda of handing out huge infrastructural developments to private capital to finance and profit by," says Waterford Sinn Féin general election candidate David Cullinane. "Waterford faces a stark choice. Will the state finance this huge infrastructural development, and provide the bridge and road system to the people without charge, or will the government hive off the contract to a private company and allow the private company to make money by exacting a toll on motorists who use the bridge?"
This issue goes right to the heart of economic policy of the government," says John Dwyer. "There are essential services which must be provided if the quality of our lives is to improve. One of them is in the provision of roads.
"But we're talking here of all essential services: clean water, electricity, waste disposal, sewage, transport and roads, housing, hospitals, and so on. Do we want to see these essential services funded out of revenue, free to the people to enjoy, or do we want to treat them as potential huge earners for private companies granted a monopoly to supply an essential service and then to charge all the people for the use of it.
"Once a private company has the monopoly to provide an essential service, it can charge what it likes - and the people have to pay. The monopoly provider gets to write a blank cheque. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are just a means to allow private companies to make huge profit at great cost to the public.
"The extent to which government, the public leg of the partnership, kicks in at all, it is to use taxpayers' money to help the private company in finding the huge capital costs of the project - a joint partnership. This means the taxpayer pays twice, once to provide the capital to the private company through taxation, and then to pay the private company back for supplying the service, which we have to pay for.
"Toll gate collectors are being paid for the provision of absolutely no service whatever. They slow up the traffic and filter a proportion of the toll charges, after the payment of their wages, back to the company in profits.
"We need to come into the 21st century and recognise that decent roads, where traffic moves, are an essential service that must be provided for everybody's use. There is no benefit in handing over the provision of essential services to private companies except the redistribution of income from the taxpayer to the private corporate sector. Such monopolies are the profiteer's panacea.
"We in Sinn Féin don't accept this right wing agenda in the EU, nor the slavish implementation of it here in Ireland by the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition government. Republicans have fought over 30 years of conflict to bring equality to this country, which is at the very heart of the Good Friday Agreement. We hold a vision of an Ireland where increased wealth is diverted by government to improving the quality of life for all of the people, where transport, roads, waste management, hospitals, schools, parks, culture and all those things that create a higher standard of living, are provided free by government to the people to enjoy, funded by progressive taxation, taxing the rich more heavily than the poor, with everyone benefiting alike.
"This is the step towards equality and the new Ireland we want to see. We are radically opposed to any system where essential services are rationed out on the basis of who can afford to pay, and this applies to housing, hospitals just as it does to roads and transport."
* After Friday afternoon's launch of the campaign, Waterford Sinn Féin hosted a social in the Ferry Bar, attended by some 400 people. Two representatives of the parents from Holy Cross School in Ardoyne told the story of their struggle for the rights of their children to go to school. A beautiful plaque was then presented by the republican ex-prisoner Kevin Dunphy, who spent ten years in an English jail, to Jan Taylor, recently released after seven years in jail in England, to mark the contribution he has made to the struggle for equality in Ireland.
Sinn Féin representatives from four counties, David Cullinane (Waterford), Kevin Dunphy (Kilkenny) and Councillors John Dwyer (Wexford) and Liam Walsh (Tipperary), joined together last Friday, 2 November to launch an anti toll campaign in Waterford City to oppose any proposed toll charges on the city's planned second river crossing. The campaign will start with a petition across the four counties concerned calling on the government not to introduce toll charges on the new bridge.
After a decade when motorists have endured wasted hours queuing to get across the one bridge into Waterford City, the planned second bridge will link to the new bypass and provide a 'gateway to the South East Region'.
"The trouble is," Sinn Féin people point out, "that you are going to have to pay at the gate, if the government, and Junior Minister of Finance, Martin Cullen, get their way."
Sinn Féin is set against the state's plan to use Public Private Partnerships to build roads. "It is a disgraceful economic strategy to which we are totally opposed," said John Dwyer, Sinn Féin councillor in New Ross, Wexford. He said it was not only an unfair tax on the ordinary motorist but would also represent an extra financial burden for haulage and transport companies.
"The Fianna Fáil PD coalition government has fallen unquestioning into the EU right wing agenda of handing out huge infrastructural developments to private capital to finance and profit by," says Waterford Sinn Féin general election candidate David Cullinane. "Waterford faces a stark choice. Will the state finance this huge infrastructural development, and provide the bridge and road system to the people without charge, or will the government hive off the contract to a private company and allow the private company to make money by exacting a toll on motorists who use the bridge?"
This issue goes right to the heart of economic policy of the government," says John Dwyer. "There are essential services which must be provided if the quality of our lives is to improve. One of them is in the provision of roads.
"But we're talking here of all essential services: clean water, electricity, waste disposal, sewage, transport and roads, housing, hospitals, and so on. Do we want to see these essential services funded out of revenue, free to the people to enjoy, or do we want to treat them as potential huge earners for private companies granted a monopoly to supply an essential service and then to charge all the people for the use of it.
"Once a private company has the monopoly to provide an essential service, it can charge what it likes - and the people have to pay. The monopoly provider gets to write a blank cheque. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are just a means to allow private companies to make huge profit at great cost to the public.
"The extent to which government, the public leg of the partnership, kicks in at all, it is to use taxpayers' money to help the private company in finding the huge capital costs of the project - a joint partnership. This means the taxpayer pays twice, once to provide the capital to the private company through taxation, and then to pay the private company back for supplying the service, which we have to pay for.
"Toll gate collectors are being paid for the provision of absolutely no service whatever. They slow up the traffic and filter a proportion of the toll charges, after the payment of their wages, back to the company in profits.
"We need to come into the 21st century and recognise that decent roads, where traffic moves, are an essential service that must be provided for everybody's use. There is no benefit in handing over the provision of essential services to private companies except the redistribution of income from the taxpayer to the private corporate sector. Such monopolies are the profiteer's panacea.
"We in Sinn Féin don't accept this right wing agenda in the EU, nor the slavish implementation of it here in Ireland by the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition government. Republicans have fought over 30 years of conflict to bring equality to this country, which is at the very heart of the Good Friday Agreement. We hold a vision of an Ireland where increased wealth is diverted by government to improving the quality of life for all of the people, where transport, roads, waste management, hospitals, schools, parks, culture and all those things that create a higher standard of living, are provided free by government to the people to enjoy, funded by progressive taxation, taxing the rich more heavily than the poor, with everyone benefiting alike.
"This is the step towards equality and the new Ireland we want to see. We are radically opposed to any system where essential services are rationed out on the basis of who can afford to pay, and this applies to housing, hospitals just as it does to roads and transport."
* After Friday afternoon's launch of the campaign, Waterford Sinn Féin hosted a social in the Ferry Bar, attended by some 400 people. Two representatives of the parents from Holy Cross School in Ardoyne told the story of their struggle for the rights of their children to go to school. A beautiful plaque was then presented by the republican ex-prisoner Kevin Dunphy, who spent ten years in an English jail, to Jan Taylor, recently released after seven years in jail in England, to mark the contribution he has made to the struggle for equality in Ireland.