Workers Solidarity Movement

The Campaign Against Household & Water Taxes has produced this useful FAQ on the new Property Tax that answers basic questions about the tax that will be of interest to those determined to resist it.

The Government call it a Property Tax but it’s really a tax on the family home and once they get the foot in the door with this tax it will only rise. Along with the water tax (which comes in next year) households will be hit with bills of 1,000 euro a year and more before too long.

Five years of austerity have hammered ordinary people. No more. The Government must be stopped in their tracks on this one.

Depending on whose figures you believe, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people took to the streets yesterday (Sat 9^th February) to register their opposition to the foisting of private bank debt onto the shoulders of ordinary workers, the refusal to tax the wealthy and the accompanying austerity agenda which has led to wage cuts, job losses, cuts in services and a plethora of increased taxation measures all of which have disproportionately affected those on low and middle incomes.

The evening of Monday the 28th February saw members of the Cork CAHWT walk from the Imperial Hotel on the South Mall to the City Council chambers at City Hall. We entered the public galleries of the council to remind the councillors of our continued intention to boycott the unfair and unjust property tax and the coming water taxes.

On Saturday lunchtime about 3,000 citizens marched through the streets of Cork in support of the continuing boycott of the Household Tax and in protest at the sixth straight austerity budget to be imposed on the Irish working class, which was unveiled this week by the Labour/Fine Gael coalition government.

In what has to be one of its odder decisions Morning Ireland this morning decided that the best voice of opposition to the Property Tax was obviously someone from Finna Fail the political party who began the process of bringing the tax in.  The property tax was part of the package of cuts Finna Fail agreed with the Trokia while in government. To most people the more obvious voice of opposition would certainly be the mass campaign of some 50% of households that has refused to pay the Household Charge, the fore runner of the property tax.  That campaign also brought thousands of people to protest outside the Fine Gael ard fheis.

On Saturday, more than 15,000 people marched through Dublin to demand an end to austerity and to oppose the State’s transferring of the financial crisis on to the shoulders of the working class.  Organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions and the Campaign against the Household and Water Taxes, the march offered people an opportunity to pressure the government prior to the budget and to raise the profile of the CAHWT, already the most popular act of civil disobedience since the foundation of the state.

On Saturday 24th November, thousands of people will march from Parnell Square to the GPO in Dublin behind the slogan “Boycott The Property Tax.  Fight Austerity”.  This protest, jointly organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes, Communities Against Cuts and the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, will give people the opportunity to show their opposition to the introduction of the property tax and the further entrenchment of the austerity agenda which will come in the budget on 5th December.

Despite increasingly desperate attempts by the government to extract their pound of flesh from householders,the Campaign against Household and Water Taxes (CAHWT) continues to rack up victories.

On Wednesday last, 19th September, the United Left Alliance held a press conference at which it announced “plans to launch a public campaign of resistance to property tax and austerity”.  For those of us who have been working alongside ULA members for over 12 months now to build the broad-based Campaign Against Household & Water Taxes (CAHWT), this announcement came as something of a surprise. CAHWT already is a ‘public campaign of resistance to property tax’ so why do the ULA (who are part of CAHWT) feel the need to ‘launch’ something that already exists?