Household Charge

I joined and got a normal email as well.

I logged in a bit later to pay and it told me there was no balance due for my address!!
 
Purple said:
Signed up and paid.
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Fair play - the law abiding majority should make it perfectly clear that we recognise the powers we have invested in our democratically elected government.

I will pay in the next few weeks, not brave enough (in terms of a fear of system glitches and subsequent admin hassles) to pay on the first day!
 
To those posters asking what are these charges for - the council charges are there for a very good reason - to pay the hundreds if not thousands of council employees, most especially those that sit in offices all day and shuffle paper.
The most important of these employees are those in planning departments whose numbers have hardly diminished in the last few years despite the lack of building ,whether properties or roads, and despite the almost total lack of major planning applications.
So let's pay up and keep these essential people in safe ,secure,pensionable employment !
 
Like the TV license the easiest way to get out of the system is never to get on the system in the first place. Once you are registered they have you forever

Wait for the council to contact you and don't do their registration work for them

As said they have plenty of staff. Would give the planning staff something useful to do.


oldnick said:
To those posters asking what are these charges for - the council charges are there for a very good reason - to pay the hundreds if not thousands of council employees, most especially those that sit in offices all day and shuffle paper.
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Don't forget, taxpayers and ratepayers need to send the councillors to New York or Boston or Chicago or whereever for St Patricks Day.
I don't have an issue with senior ministers doing it, Ireland needs to sell and promote

And I'll maybe allow the councillors to go though is this not the job of the IDA?
But they bring their wives and husbands and expect the public to pay for their junket.

Sinn Féin for all their faults don't have their councillors getting involved in this, fair play
 
micmclo said:
Wait for the council to contact you and don't do their registration work for them

As said they have plenty of staff. Would give the planning staff something useful to do.
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If we all register correctly (takes 5 mins) it removes the need for inefficient bureaucracy. The more of this type of thing that's automated the more transparent the work actually done in the public sector becomes.

The public have a responsibility to be efficient in their dealings with the public service.

The "I'm paying for it, so I sure as hell am going to get my money's worth through wasting time and resources" attitude is counter productive.
 
DerKaiser said:
The public have a responsibility to be efficient in their dealings with the public service.

The "I'm paying for it, so I sure as hell am going to get my money's worth through wasting time and resources" attitude is counter productive.
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+1 to that.
 
I will pay it but there is a genuine question that needs to be asked in that what exactly are we paying for? They say we pay for the following: Fire and emergency services; maintenance and cleaning of streets; planning and development; public parks; street lighting; libraries; open spaces and leisure amenities.

Fire & Emgerency servies should be paid for out of tax revenue just like we pay for the Gardai and Public Hospitals.
Maintenance, cleaning of streets and street lighting: I live in a managed estate so already pay for maintenance and street lighting. So left with street cleaners.
Libraries and leisure amenities should be paid for by the users. (probably cheaper to give everyone a kindle than run some libaries). We have no library or public amenity in my area so not sure what I am paying for.
Planning & Devlopement: Please, after the performance of the last decade, I am expected to pay for this!!
I actually don't mind paying for the parks because to be fair to my local authority, I think the Parks Division does a wonderful job.
 
Signed up today for it, took a while though, site seemed very slow. I'll pay it out my next pay packet. Can't wait.. NOT!
 
Knuttell said:
My original point stills stands,Fine Gael did not mismanage the Country to the point where we are bankrupt,that was the point I was making nothing more nothing less.
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By following the exact same policies in paying off all of the non-secured bondholders etc coupled with the worst form of economic mis-management (increase VAT in a recession! USC charges taxing an average of €1,400 out of average pockets and they say they have not increased taxes!) they are continuing to destroy the economy. You cannot tax your way out of a recession.

FG & Labour have lost any electoral mandate they had as they have utterley reneged on all of their pre-election fibs and are now zero difference to the previous shower!
 
Sunny said:
I will pay it but there is a genuine question that needs to be asked in that what exactly are we paying for? .
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This government is sitting on a report on how .5 billion can be saved by rationalisation of local government.

Instead of tackling waste - this government is inflicting slelth taxes on the population.

We really don't need over 100 local authorities.

But we have a government that is inflicted by cowardice.
 

Do you think we can borrow our way out of a recession?
We have the worst exchequer deficit in the developed world. Even if we can get growth to 3% (which would be next to impossible) we’d still have to cut spending by €3-€5 billion a year for the next 4-5 years just to reduce our deficit to a manageable amount. Add to that the fact that we need to come up with €7 billion a year just to pay the interest on what we’ve already borrowed.
We could always tell everyone to get stuffed and not repay anything but then we’ve have to borrow €20 billion a year at 12-15%, there’d be a massive outflow of capital from the country (bigger than the one we have already) and our banks would collapse again. In other words we have no choice but to do what we are doing. The dye was cast between 2001 and 2007. Everything that came after was almost inevitable.

Bottom line; our wealth and resulting lifestyles for the last 15 years were an illusion, funded by money that we didn’t have. We’re on the long hard road back to reality. More taxes, less money, more poverty, fewer services, bigger classes in schools, more people dying because of inefficiencies and misallocation of resources in the healthcare system etc.
 
Purple said:
Do you think we can borrow our way out of a recession?
.
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Nor do I believe in an inequitable regressive taxation system that penalises the poorest and lowest income earner being foisted on the public with no electoral mandate by FG & Labour.

The money raised is being used to pay off unsecured bond holders etc

There are numerous fair ways to garner taxes by using a fair progressive taxation system to raise revenue rather than in the unfair manner that the new stealth taxes/poll taxes are being used
 
I don't have a problem with a property tax (in theory) assuming the money is spent locally. What I have a problem with is the fact that I paid stamp duty at the time of purchase. If this were to be offset until it was reached, I think I could live with that.
 
By EU standards we are still under taxed. High earners are slightly under taxed and low earners are more under taxed. Our system currently disproportionately penalises high earners, not low earners.
If we are looking to cut spending I’d tax children’s allowance (which currently costs the state €2.5 billion a year) and I’d replace the public service pension levy with a comparable pay cut so that retired public servants take the cut as well (screwing young public servants with large mortgages and childcare costs while leaving their former colleagues untouched is disgraceful). Whatever happens we’ll all be paying more taxes and getting less in return in the years to come.
 

Fair questions - but do you honestly thing that you are going to get a decent answer from any authority on it? ... such as... here is how much was gatherered, here is the cost of running a particular dept/services and here is how much went towards it. It will just get dumped into the slush fund along with all the other sources of revenue and used to pay*for quango's, trips, ministerial pensions, unvouched TD expenses - as well as the essential stuff like the guards, teachers, public lighting etc.

Oh and by the way everyone - its €100 this year - watch for the increases next year. It's a wonder they are not even charging VAT on it!
 
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