Sir, – Here’s an example of the utter disconnect between government, both local and national, and those in the private sector desperately clinging on against an ever-burgeoning tide of taxes, charges and levies that fund the former’s surreal pensions and guaranteed jobs.
Louth County Council will, next week, remove the concession granted a year ago to the remaining retailers in the recession-ravaged town of Ardee of an hour’s free parking for shoppers before the conscientious wardens begin to pounce.
Swathes of retail outlets in Ardee are empty, shackled by a parking regime whereby large numbers of people find themselves paying substantial fines for infractions – sometimes only minutes long – vowing never to return to shop in Ardee. This is slowly choking the life out of the town (and of course greatly exacerbating an already chronic unemployment problem) because the council refuses to remove this intolerable burden.
The council, instead of dealing with its own shrinking income and making the necessary savings and economies from within (as everyone in the private sector has had to do for the past five years), seeks to make up losses by taking more taxes from the public.
This is an example of what is being done on a national scale. The default position of the Government in dealing with gross inefficiencies and losses in the public sector is not to deal with the necessary internal adjustments, but to increase taxes on the already reeling private sector while continuing to give themselves “increments” and spectacular pensions. Truly, we live in parallel universes. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD McDONNELL,
Market Square,
Ardee, Co Louth.