Interview With Cllr Eric Byrne II

The second and final part of the interview Eric Byrne did with Irish Election. Part 1 is here. The last three questions have been asked in the comments elsewhere.
IE.com: Slightly connected, business and the private sector make a great deal of noise about tax levels, so much so that Pat Rabbitte suggested that Labour would not raise taxes once in government. Can Labour still make the arguments for the other side of the equation in this argument-namely the poor and unemployed in our society or are their interests equally well served by lower tax regimes?

EB: Tax Reform is a vital ingredient for the Labour Party particularly adjustments for those in low-paid employment. The current situation has seen those on low-incomes being taken out of the tax net only to be promptly brought back in with the minor increases they receive in the Budget. Meanwhile stealth taxes and other rises take more and more money out of their pockets.

People on low pay in receipt of Family Income Supplement and whose net disposal income is less than someone on social welfare and still they are not entitled to a medical card.

The following is what the party leader said in his pre-Budget priorities.

[This has been edited but the full list of priorities and costings for mentioned are here.]

“LABOUR’S PRIORITIES FOR BUDGET 2006

1.Reward Work - Index the Standard Rate Band by 15%

•The Biggest Stealth Tax of all is the Non-Indexation of the Standard Rate Band.

•Under Fianna Fáil and the PDs, more people pay tax at 42% than at 20%. In fact, 42% has become the true Standard Rate.

- Labour demands an increase in the Standard Tax Band by €4500 for a single person, and double that amount for couples.

Estimated Cost: €600 million

2.Tackle the Cost of GP services – Cap Fees and Improve Tax Rebate

•Doctors’ fees have increased by 87% since 1997

•A&E charges have increased by 400% since 1997 and have almost doubled since 2002.

•The percentage of the population entitled to a full medical card has fallen to the lowest level in 30 years.

-Labour demands that - as a short-term measure - the Government introduce a Maximum Prices Order on GPs. This would freeze GP fees at existing levels. labour demands that the Budget should also augment the tax relief for medical expenses. The latest figures, for 2002, show that only 144,000 taxpayers claimed relief on medical expenses. By abolishing the €125/€250 excess which currently applies, more taxpayers would be able to avail of this relief.

Estimated Cost: €7 million (latest figures refer to 2002)

3.Tax Justice - Introduce a Minimum Effective Tax Rate:

•Under Fianna Fáil and the PDs, a wide range of tax relief’s have been developed and extended which allow super wealthy individuals to reduce their personal tax bills, in some cases to zero.

•This is unfair to the vast majority of taxpayers and must end.

•This should be done by introducing a Minimum Effective Tax Rate.

-Labour demands that no-one earning more than €250,000 per annum should pay less than, say, 20% of their income in tax, irrespective of what relief’s they might otherwise avail of.

5.Opportunity in Welfare – The Rent Allowance

•It is vital that the Government make progress in the Budget towards its stated targets under the National Anti-Poverty Strategy. But this is not sufficient.

•We must also reform the welfare system to extend opportunities and incentives to learn and work to all who can avail of them.

•At present, one of the biggest poverty and employment traps are the recently imposed strictures on local authority Rent Allowance.

•As social housing provision falls short of need, more and more people are reliant on Rent Allowance. Taking up work, however, leads to the loss of the Rent Allowance. This means that a person must be able to command a salary significantly greater than the minimum wage, to replace the loss of their Rent Allowance when they take up a job.

•This leaves people locked in a poverty and unemployment trap.

Labour demands reform of the Rent Allowance to allow for a phased withdrawal of the Allowance on entering employment

6.School Budgets - Double Capitation Grants

•The government have not delivered the school buildings they promised

•They have not delivered the teachers they promised.

•They have starved primary schools of resources.

•Labour wants to reform the way schools are funded. As a short-term measure, however, the Government should double capitation funding to schools.

Labour demands that the Budget double the capitation grant for primary schools allowing head teachers to focus on education, not penny pinching.

Estimated Cost: €135 million

7.Childcare – Introduce a Childcare Payment and paid Parental Leave

In our recent policy document “Putting Children First”, the Labour Party set out an integrated childcare policy based the principle of parental choice, and built around five pillars: -A Childcare Payment of €50 per week -A year’s paid Maternity/Parental Leave -Free pre-school education for all -More childcare places -Measures to enhance the quality of care.

Estimated Cost: €259 million for longer, paid Parental Leave (as a significant first step towards the implementation of Labour’s full €1.5 billion policy on Childcare).”

IE.com: Are you worried about the dual threat of increased globalisation-driven outsourcing and job loss in this country? Is job-quality an issue that we ought to worry about from 2007-2012?

EB: The race to the bottom is a major concern to Labour. The issue is being debated currently in Europe. This is a very serious debate and was brought to a head by Irish Ferries and the GAMA or ESB Moneypoint. Job quality is a massive issue and I will be campaigning with my party colleagues for a “living wage” as against the race to the bottom to minimum wage standards. This campaign will be launched later in the money.

As a representative from Dublin you are most intitmately aware of the increasing prices of property and housing in this country, should Labour in government take initiatives to help control prices and steady the market? Are you personally comfortable with the Taoiseachs lack of worry over housing market and our-relatedly-increasing reliance on debt?

The Labour Party position is well documented on this. The price of building land is the predominate reason why houses are so costly and this is a key area that must be addressed in order to help reduce the cost of housing. Housing is of major concern to me as a public representative in Dublin, so much so I recently published a pamphlet entitled ‘Housing Area K’ [here] concerning the inadequacies of the State’s current housing policy as relating to my constituency. If anyone is interested in reading the pamphlet, get in touch with me and I will send one on.

The Labour Party has been making the point for some time that the Government’s housing policies must be changed in order to ensure that those who cannot afford today’s high prices are able to have a home of their own.

Special measures are now required to deal with this problem. Previously the Government has intervened in the market, but that has been merely to assist investors and speculators by abolishing the first time buyer’s grant and reducing stamp duty for investors. Now, there must be some measure of payback for families who are struggling to afford their own home.

IE.com: Eric Byrne is a survivor of a close count and contested election result. I wonder how he feels about the principle of electronic voting. Would he favour retaining the traditional paper ballot and manual count?

EB: There can be no doubt that in my case an electronic result would have been fairer. To this day it is impossible to say who really won that seat after “the long count”. The official result was Ben won by five votes but the public was never aware that the City Sheriff called us all together to tell us how he was going to declare for Ben. There were two votes sitting on top of the bundles which we pointed out were spoiled and in my favour, and the City Sheriff agreed that they were indeed but as they were only two and the difference between Ben and I was five he was not obliged to have an official 3rd. recount on the basis of two not being sufficient to constitute a material difference.

The argument against the use of electronic voting is one that I support on the grounds that there is NO paper trail. The FG former Minister for Justice Nora Owens is an example of the potential clinical ruthlessness of electronic voting but is democracy better served notwithstanding the delays? I believe democracy is better served by the traditional paper system. This is a good question because in my case a Government could not be formed for 12 days. One or two votes decided the complexion of the new Government. It hung in the balance for twelve days between a centre left or centre right and the right ultimately won.

IE.com: The councillor has been a public representative since 1985. Does he think local government has served or failed the needs of the state as a whole over that time? (Examples: Electoral Roll, Planning and Development, public housing, waste policy.) And why?

EB: There is no “local democracy” in Ireland that can even compare with the great Local Government democratic structures that exist in Europe and North America. The two-tiered structure of “local Government” in Ireland is a denial of the people’s rights to democratic representation because central Government is determined to use the managerial structures to implement it’s will as against trusting and empowering those with a democratic mandate to meaningfully govern. The power of the managerial system in Ireland constitutes the most undemocratic facet of Irish political life. Imagine a Lord Mayor with a” Mansion House” a “carriage” and six horses and a “golden chain” but having only identical powers as the other 51 councillors makes a laughing stock of the office of the First Citizen and perpetrates the most disturbing political scam on the electorate. Tinkering at the edges of so called reforms like suggesting that a directly elected Lord Mayor would improve things is a farce unless it was part of a total restructuring of Local Government. The essence of the debate would have to be around a real, meaningful and transparent transfer of power from non elected autocrats (bureaucrats) to democratically elected public representatives.

IE.com: Which would be the least palatable serving in a FG/Lab/Green/PD coalition or FF/Lab coalition.

EB: There are two parties I would never share power with and the PDs is one of them.