A BILL TO repeal the household charge will be debated in the Dáil tonight as the party proposing it, Sinn Féin, today put forward alternatives to the €100 tax on property owners.
The Laois Offaly TD and party environment spokesperson Brian Stanley urged members of the Labour Party to support the bill saying that if it is successfully passed, those who have already paid the charge will be reimbursed.
The bill will almost certainly be voted down by the government.
Around 925,000 households across the country have registered to pay the charge raising around €93 million so far with over 40,000 householders hit with penalties and interest of between €11 and €13 in addition to the €100 flat tax.
Some 1.6 million households are estimated to be eligible for the charge with a campaign boycotting the charge encouraging hundreds of thousands of people not to pay.
The Sinn Féin-proposed Bill will be introduced in the Dáil this evening at 7.30pm and will be debated by TDs until 9pm.
A vote on the Local Government (Household Charge) (Repeal) Bill 2012, as it is officially known, will be held on Wednesday evening.
Stanley said the bill had the support of trade unions including UNITE, Mandate and the Dublin Council of Trade Unions and outlined a number of possible alternatives to raise the €160 million needed to fund local authority services.
These include a 48 per cent tax on income over €100,000, raising €410 million; the abolishment of ‘Group relief’ availed of by companies to transfer losses to profitable companies and write down tax receipts, raising €450.3 million; abolishment of property reliefs, raising €341.8 million; and a cap on all public servants wages at €100,000 per annum, saving €265 million.
“Each of these measures has the potential to raise far more than what is needed to reinstate 2011 funding for local government. But instead the government went for the lazy option of digging deeper in to the public’s pockets,” Stanely claimed.
He added that it was a “fair and common sense approach”.
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