Sir, – Your lead story tells us that the TV licence fee is to be supplemented by exchequer funding (“Ministers rule out collection of TV licence by Revenue”, News, July 19th).
General Taxation, who was enjoying a well-deserved breather after the water charges campaign, is to be pressed back into service.
RTÉ has for years complained that, while it received about €200 million a year in licence fee income, evasion cost it of the order of €50 million each year. Based on these figures, the compliance rate was 80 per cent. Of course the compliance rate is now lower because of the principled decision of many of the consumers of RTÉ's service not to renew their licences in protest at the drip-feed of revelations from and about RTÉ. Some of us will always find a principle which justifies not paying for something which we use.
The local property tax (LPT) compliance rate is of the order of 95 per cent. Achieving that higher compliance rate for the TV licence would mean additional annual revenues of about €37 million for RTÉ. And what explains the difference in compliance rates? LPT collection and enforcement are in the hands of Revenue while the purchase of a television licence is effectively a voluntary act of patriotism or foolhardiness.
Minister for Media Catherine Martin is reported as saying that an effort to improve compliance levels by transferring collection to Revenue would be “unpalatable”. She does not elaborate as to who might find it unpalatable but it can hardly be those who currently pay the licence fee.
Why do we have report after report on RTÉ's financial difficulties when the solution is staring all of us in the face? It would appear that we are fated to repeat the water charges farce by making those who are happy to pay pick up the tab for those who are not. Should we then not do the same by abolishing LPT, car tax, vehicle registration tax , bus and rail fares, duties on cigarettes and alcohol and VAT and pick up the tab from general taxation, which is a technical term much favoured by the left to describe tax paid by the other fellow? We would then have reached the state of fiscal nirvana in which the 40 per cent of income earners in Ireland who have no income tax liability would pay for nothing. – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.