Dear Charlie, - You probably wake up babbling with terror in the middle of the night after dreaming that you were cornered by pack of hacks, trying to preach you to death. A terrible fate: and you lie there, weeping in despair at your unloved status, until a little thought comes into the bookie's thinker that is your brain, writes Kevin Myers
The thought is that there's a little corner of The Irish Times which applauded your tax cuts years ago, when just about every other media body was saying that you should increase tax in order to create more social equality. You didn't go along with that bilge, Charlie. For you didn't see tax as an instrument with which to create a society around ideologically correct models, punishing the successful and distributing their loot to the poor.
You believed that the best way of making the poor richer is to encourage them to work, and you do that by lowering taxes. With lower taxes must come incentives to save, to invest. Yet for decades, a crippling dependency culture had emerged, based on the belief, shared by both the lazy right, the traditional left, and the stupid in between, that the State was there to bail the entire population out.
National attitudes
You had to change national attitudes. The greater bulk of the population had to be introduced into a novel culture of personal independence, individual responsibility and financial providence.
You managed it. Others played their part - Mary Harney, of course, and John Bruton in a now forgotten role; as indeed did Alan Dukes with his history-making Tallaght strategy, similarly unsung.
Attitudes have changed so much in the past 10 years or so that we'd have trouble recognising the cultural norms that were taken for granted in the 1980s.
But the left still hate you, Charlie, because you didn't clothe your ideas with unmeant pieties; and frankly, sometimes you are so brutally forthright that I wonder how you got into politics at all.
Maybe that's why journalists were happy to cosh you, even during the good times.
These are still the good times. They're just not as good as they were. So we've all got to tighten our noses and put our belts to the grindstone. If taxes have to rise, so be it. But Charlie, there's unpleasant talk, yet again, of you increasing PRSI.
Double taxation
Charlie: That is double taxation, because we pay tax on the PRSI we pay to the State. We don't get the money, but we still pay tax as if we did. And Charlie, double taxation is illegal in European law. You know that, don't you? But not merely is PRSI double taxation, but it is also discriminatory. It discriminates against PAYE workers, who pay full PRSI, as opposed to all those civil servants who advise you and who pay PRSI at half the rate that the rest of us do. Of course that term "PAYE worker" doesn't mean you; nor does it mean any of your TD colleagues.
For the tame dogs in the Dáil live in a preferential PRSI-land, where, at best, they pay PRSI at marginal rates. Is it surprising that whenever the levels of PRSI are increased, the Opposition stay as silent as clams, because they as individuals won't pay it? PRSI merely penalises the PAYE workers, the backbone of the Irish economy, but it doesn't hurt you or your fellow TDs.
Nor does it penalise those barristers and solicitors for whom the State has had to widen the doors of the tribunals to enable them to get their fat bellies through. They don't earn salaries. They earn fees, and fees don't attract PRSI. Thus the most extraordinarily privileged class in Ireland, which has benefited so hugely from the disease of public-funded tribunals, and which has actually set the level of fees for itself, will make no contribution whatsoever to the national social insurance fund of the State.
Charlie: This is wicked. This is disgusting. This is obscene. And lawyers are not alone. Most of the professional classes - including vets, GPs, architects and hospital consultants - are almost entirely spared the PRSI burden which every council worker and every supermarket checkout girl contributes in full to the State.
You know that there's really no such thing as "public opinion" in Ireland. People whinge in private, but they don't take meaningful action. Our political and administrative classes are the most inept in Europe because they're confident that there's no retribution for services which do not work, for buses which are pathologically late, for trains that are dirty and overcrowded, for traffic management which creates traffic jams, and for a legal class that has prospered enormously, and which doesn't even begin to pay its way.
Here's the deal
So naturally, that's the very class I'm going to turn to if you decide to raise PRSI. Here's the deal, Charlie. You hit us PAYE workers for more PRSI payments, and I'm going to instruct my solicitor to take proceedings, initially in local courts, and I'll go all the way to Europe if need be.
You know that if I take a case, you'll lose, don't you? It'll cost you an arm and a leg, it'll make me the most popular person in Ireland, and you the most reviled. Sure, I'll take any fair PAYE increase on the chin, as a social duty, and keep smiling. But mess with PRSI, so that I'm paying a tax which barristers and the political and administrative classes aren't, and Charlie, I swear to God, I'll see you in court. And I'll win.