Fintan O'Toole: If you want to understand the fiasco over university fees, forget university fees. Forget the Dáil and Seanad debates. Forget the politicians going head-to-head on Morning Ireland or The Last Word. Forget events in Dublin last week and think instead about two things that happened this last week in Mullingar and Brussels.
In Mullingar a prominent local businessman starred in a very rare event: a prosecution for tax evasion. He was one of more than 400 investors in the notorious Clerical Medical International offshore investment scheme sold by National Irish Bank, which was itself one of a large number of tax scams operated in this country. The scale of his evasion was not clear but can be gauged from the fact that after he was caught he paid well over €600,000 in back taxes. The judge made all the right noises. "Tax evasion is a criminal act. These crimes are against society at large and not against an individual. They are crimes just like theft or fraud." And the punishment for these crimes? A total fine of €1,500. This is what it means to make an example of a wealthy tax evader. The cost of a weekend golfing trip with a few good dinners.
While Mullingar was stamping out tax evasion, Tánaiste Mary Harney was enjoying the opposite kind of experience. She was in Brussels to receive the annual award of the Taxpayers' Association of Europe, a right-wing lobby group whose aims are to reflect "the desire of citizens to protect themselves from the increasing tax claims of the state" by supporting "lower taxes and more individual freedom" and opposing "unjust harassment by tax collectors".
In her acceptance speech, the Tánaiste fully endorsed these aims speaking of "the tax policies you and I believe in". She boasted that the Fianna Fáil/PD governments in which she has been involved "took 13 points off the top rate of tax \ 27½ points off corporation tax and 20 points off capital gains tax." She warned that across Europe "we find some political parties still enticing the public with new social schemes paid for by higher taxes".
And yes this is the same Mary Harney who opposed the reintroduction of university fees on the grounds that "I believe the way you collect taxes from the rich is through the general taxation system". Within a few hours, the Tánaiste could, with a straight face, both put herself forward as the champion of tax cuts for the well-off, the defender of taxpayers from "harassment" by nasty tax collectors and propose that the solution to the grotesque inequities in third-level education was to use the taxation system to make the rich pay.
This is why there was an element of farce about the whole episode. There is a rational, intelligent debate to be had about whether or not third-level education should be seen as a universal right paid for by a fair taxation system. But we can't have that debate in Ireland. The basic assumption that it is possible to trust the taxation system does not apply.
The decision to get rid of fees in the first place was a poor use of the available resources. But it is wrong to caricature the people most concerned about Noel Dempsey's proposals as rich, selfish money-grabbers trying to protect their privileges. The bulk of them are in fact PAYE workers who've paid their taxes all their lives. On the scale of rich, selfish money-grubbers they are in the halfpenny place. For these people, the last few years have been infuriating. They've been exposed as gullible idiots. While they were paying penal rates of taxation, their betters were living in offshore Ireland and smirking smugly at the fools who believed all that stuff about making sacrifices and tightening their belts. Why should they listen when a Taoiseach who never opened his mouth about the fleecing of the public purse by the genuinely rich lectures them now about social solidarity?
And there's no evidence that the corruption of the taxation system is a phenomenon of the dim, distant past. The figures for incomes declared for tax purposes are still about as credible as Jeffrey Archer. The whole system of determining university maintenance grants is based on these declared incomes and is therefore utterly untrustworthy.
Ten years ago, the de Butleir report on third-level student support pointed out the blatant rigging of declared incomes to qualify for grants by everyone except PAYE workers and the way the means test "ignores the accumulated wealth of individuals". Putting up the grant levels without reforming that system is, as Noel Dempsey knows very well, a disgrace. Yet that is exactly what he announced on Sunday.
Any reform that is based on making the well-off pay will be a fiasco so long as we can't trust the tax system to identify the well-off and politicians to be proud of taking high taxes from them.
So long as tax evaders get off with pitiful fines and ministers support universal public provisions while pandering to those who don't want to pay for them, social justice will remain a moot point.