ON THE Friday I stood on a pavement and watched the least privileged men, women, and children in Ireland - less privileged even than the travellers, because the travelling community isn't overwhelmed by hard drugs - march through the centre of Dublin to demand action against drug pushers. Many of the marchers were visibly - unmistakably - very poor.
On the Sunday, there was an emergency in the house about the dog, and I had no option but to call out a vet. The visit cost £50. Cash. Into his hand. No mention of a receipt. See any connection?
On the following Tuesday I read on one page of the paper that there is a boom in consumer spending. Car sales, for example, are very substantially up on previous years.
Personal income is set to rise by 6 per cent this year. Meanwhile, on another page of the newspaper, I see that Fianna Fail has launched a campaign for the repeal of the Residential Property Tax. This at a time when, as it happens, mortgage interest rates are expected to fall, saving mortgage holders more in a year than most of them pay in RPT anyway.
We were never in a better position to pay a small levy on our valuable property. House owners were never in a better position to make a special contribution towards the general tax take, which is, among other things, the only source of funds for whatever fight this society is going to put up against drugs.
But Bertie Ahern is quoted as saying that the property tax is very unpopular. That's why Fianna Fail is against it. They purport to be against it because it "unfairly penalises those who reside within certain regions of the country," i.e. because most people outside Dublin get out of paying it.
But most people outside Dublin get out of paying a great many taxes. That's not why this one is worthy of a huge poster campaign from Fianna Fail. No. This one is getting special attention in the hope of delivering votes to Fianna Fail in Dublin in the next general election. And the usual people need not start complaining about how nasty everyone always is to Fianna Fail: I know very well that if Fine Gael were in opposition it would be doing exactly the same opportunistic thing.
Are the political parties correct? Is it true that everyone hates paying the property tax? Isn't there anyone out there who might feel that there is something pleasingly straightforward about this particular tax - that based as it is on a thing, a house, and another thing, the money coming into that house, it says what it is with no ifs or buts. It is a tax on having it made.
People who are living in a house worth more than £101,000 and who have more than £30,100 coming in per annum have made it, in this society. The same society, after all, expects an unemployed person to meet all his or her needs from a payment of £62.40p a week.
Never mind the bar room lawyers who can think up 100 different situations where somehow or other a comfortable income and ownership of a valuable house is bad news. You know, and I know, that people eligible for the RPT are privileged Irish people. That's why the unprivileged so readily come to mind, when this particular tax is discussed.
It is an unusually eloquent tax. It is reminiscent of the requirement in many religions Islam is a particular instance that a portion of what the fortunate have must be redistributed to the less fortunate. No particular part of Exchequer funds goes to an identifiable purpose, of course, and in that sense, the drug ravaged communities who live in public housing have no specific link with the taxpayers who live in their own good houses. But they belong together as opposite ends of the one spectrum.
Those marchers are our bottom line.
The marchers chanting "Pushers Out! Pushers Out!" didn't ask to live in public housing. They didn't ask to wear trainers instead of leather shoes. A lot of the marchers were very young: they didn't ask to be born at the kinds of addresses that shape small expectations. They didn't ask to be dependants. But they have been made abjectly dependent by drugs.
They cannot put in their own gardai or open their own clinics or decide policing priorities or set up inward investment or dictate housing policy or arrange special educational opportunities or reform the prison system. They need the rest of us. They're testing the idea of "society" because they have to. If we won't help them, no one will help them.
And I for one don't know any way of helping except by paying my taxes, and by trying to keep at least the rhetoric of social solidarity alive, in the face of the smug separatism which in the Dail debate on RPT last week some speakers didn't even bother to disguise.
"Come and join us", a man on the march was shouting. "We're not the farmers. We live here." ,He was only half joking. The main way we can join the less privileged - most of us not being practical saints like Edmund Rice - is through tax, and through the priorities we articulate, in our political choices, about how we want that tax spent. But if Fianna Fail is right we don't want to join the marchers.
WE don't want to pay the small but identifiable levy which is the RPT. They believe that a political party can confidently expect thanks for doing away with it. It seems we want everything we have. We want more of what we have. We can be expected not to want to share. We have no plans, even, for admitting to our consciousness that our fortune and others' misfortune are linked, and that if we get more of the cake, others get less.
I looked at the marchers in awe at their resilience - that after so long a battering they still have it in them to come out on the streets. Even though our proxies - the Garda denigrate their efforts. Who was standing with them?
A few priests. No bishops. One Dail deputy, Tony Gregory.
How dare the other TDs mutter about Sinn Fe in involvement when they aren't there themselves. What else would Sinn Fe in do but fill the vacuum where conventional politics has failed the people? And a thankless thing it is, too, to stand by the most needy people in Ireland, and one that has made no difference to Sinn Fein's core 3 per cent of the vote.
Which brings us back to taxation. The Progressive Democrats and Fianna Fail are making huge play of their attentiveness to the 23,000 citizens who pay RPT. They know that people with so ample a stake in our society will vote. Say there is a matching 23,000 people (and that's a minimum figure) living in communities that have become hellish, and in immediate and almost certain danger of losing their children to drugs.
Any chance of a political party running a poster campaign based on their needs and desires? No chance. To them that hath will be given, and to them that have not, even that which they have shall be taken away.