Thurles Residents Called On To Attend Property Tax Meeting

Property Tax Meeting, Hayes Hotel, Thurles, Co Tipperary

Local Property Tax (LPT) correspondence is currently being issued by the Revenue Commissioners. Currently about 75% of letters due, have been forwarded to home owners, many of which are incorrectly addressed.

Each home owner will be expected to assess the value of their home, which will involve choosing a valuation band, using a system of self assessment.

Three trade unions including Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI), UNITE and the Civil Public and Services Union (CPSU) have joined the campaign against this property tax, justifiable claiming it is causing huge distress and despair amongst the lower paid sections of Irish society.

Deputy Seamus Healy will host a public meeting on the “Family Home and Property Tax,” on Wednesday next April 10th at 8.00pm in Hayes Hotel, Thurles.

At this meeting it is hoped to express publicly, not only the current fears of home owners, but also to furnish up-to-date information on the details, of what is generally agreed by many as an unfair and unjust tax.

Challenge & Boycott Local Property Tax

This meeting will be your perfect opportunity to explore ways in which this unjust tax can be challenged & boycotted and to establish how in the long term this regressive tax will affect you and eventually your children’s future.

Deputy Healy believes, as do the majority of PAYE workers, Unemployed persons, Pensioners, & small Businesses, all residents of Co Tipperary, that this attack on our property is morally wrong, regressive to consumer spending, deliberately targeting low and middle income families and therefore should now be fully shelved and abandoned.

This legislation was initially bulldozed without a public mandate through Dáil Éireann in December last, granting the Revenue Commissioners draconian powers to collect this most unjust & duel tax on people’s homes.

To add to this debate, current data from the Irish Banking Federation now demonstrates that mortgage draw-downs which were beginning to pick up in the final quarter of last year, have become retrograde. The arrived in December of Phil Hogan’s property tax is targeted now as the main reason. Between November and February last, house prices fell by 2.6%, equal to an annualised rate of 8%.  Prior to December 2012, the property market was beginning to enter a period of some activity, through recovering prices and a definite identifiable confidence, but now we are back once again to falling negative equity.

Deputy Healy is now inviting you, the public, to come along to this meeting on Wednesday next and have your say.

Tipperary must no longer remain the “Silent People,” once referred to in the historical trilogy of Walter Macken’s prose. We must not be the future second-class citizen left to become the victims of this oppressive tax. This Local Property Tax will eventually lead rural Ireland into outright poverty, so that the likes of Dublin City Council, who benefit from all current job creation, can waste another €40m of rural taxpayers’ money to boost their O’Connell street upward only landlords & rental businesses.