Sir, – With up to 5,000 people homeless, a health service €2 billion short of what is needed and an underfunded education system struggling to accommodate an increasing number of children, we continue to bury our heads in the sand and look to our politicians for tax cuts.
Yes, we must look for efficiencies in all these areas but time has shown that the possibilities for restructuring are limited, time-consuming and costly. Improvements will come only if we pay for them.
As Cliff Taylor ("Budget battle should be about dividing the pie", Opinion & Analysis, September 26th) writes, "The only way of improving the quality of public services will be to reform how they are delivered or pay more for them through higher taxes".
In the same issue, Catherine Cleary ("Ireland's dining boom is back – but at what cost?") tells us of a recent dinner party in a restaurant where two bottles of wine were ordered at a price of just under €2,000 each.
It was appropriate that the second reading in churches on Sunday was James 5:1-6, “Now an answer for the rich. Start crying; weep for the miseries that are coming to you. Labourers mowed your fields, and you cheated them – listen to the wages that you kept back.”
There is clearly a need to increase taxation on not only the very rich, but all of us.
Is there a political party or even one politician who is honest and brave enough to present such a policy for the next general election? – Yours, etc,
JACK MORRISSEY,
Dundrum,
Dublin 16.