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Ireland introduces Free Legal Aid for everybody! – …as it seems

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Ireland introduces Free Legal Aid for everybody! – …as it seems

Some big news: Free Health services for everyone is something the government promised for years, but it didn’t happen. Instead – in a total surprise move – free legal aid for everyone was introduced in April. …we just weren’t told about it yet!

“Free Legal aid” means that the state covers the cost for solicitor/barrister and all other legal cost and this route is available to people with limited financial means to ensure that not only wealthy people can get justice, but that also poor people can defend themselves when they are accused of something.

It is a very fair concept and I don’t think that anybody could have an issue with the concept of it.

The question about “Who can get it?”, however, can be a more controversial one, but it seems that this problem has been removed now because it emerged that a member of the Irish Parliament, who is on a salary of approximately EUR 90,000 per year PLUS significant expenses can get free legal aid and if he can get it, then the majority of people in Ireland (who earn a lot less than him) MUST also be eligible for it. Right?

Anti Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy is accused of falsely imprisoning Tanaiste Joan Burton during a water charges protest in November 2014 and he has applied for free legal aid on the grounds that he can’t afford the court costs. Judge Melanie Greally from the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court has decided that based on his average weekly income, he will get free legal aid! :-O

How can that be the case for someone who has a monthly salary of EUR 4000? Well, Murphy has an agreement with his party that he only gets EUR 1,800 (after tax) per month and that the party can keep the rest.

So the money that arrives in his bank account is genuinely quite low, BUT this is a voluntary arrangement that he has with his party and herein lies the problem!

Imagine if you had a voluntary arrangement with your parents or spouse or a friend to give them more than half of your monthly salary (assuming you were lucky enough to earn 4k), do you you think a judge would also have sympathy with you? I don’t think so!

And even more so in this case, it means that you and I will pay for Paul Murphy’s legal aid (because taxes will pay for it) and his party can continue pocketing his salary, so we are indirectly funding his party! Doesn’t sound right!! We are talking about approximately EUR 50,000!

The Journal.ie reported about this here: www.thejournal.ie/paul-murphy-legal-aid-2740512-Apr2016/

The case he has to defend himself in is somewhat irrelevant in this situation, but if we looked at what he is accused of then it becomes even more questionable if he should receive a cent of tax payers money and it even makes you wonder if he is fit to be a TD: Tanaiste Joan Burton came from an event in a school in Tallaght and was on her way to a church for the rest of the event, when a protest against water charges blocked her car in and “imprisoned” her in her car for about 2 hours.

Protesting is a legal right, but stopping someone’s movements against their will is not. It was a stupid and unjustified action. No serious harm was done to anyone and you could argue that bringing him to court is a bit of an overreaction, but unfortunately there are no other means to penalise someone who misbehaves.

The real bad news is that free legal aid has NOT been introduced for everyone, instead only someone who could afford to pay from his own pocket and who knowingly broke the law, will get the money paid by you and me!

Elections, Justice, Politics, Taxes, ,

Internet Censorship to hit Ireland

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Internet Censorship to hit Ireland

EMI, Sony, Warner Music and Universal won a court case against UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Hutchison 3G Ltd and Telefonica O2 Ireland Ltd forcing them to block access to PirateBay websites within 30 days (Eircom had already given in years ago). www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0612/456177-pirate-bay-court/ This is the first time – but won’t be the last time – when the Irish SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) legislation that thanks to Junior Minister Sean Sherlock and the current Fine Gael government will bring various forms of Internet censorship to Ireland.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not in favour of Copyright Infringement and Online Piracy. It is illegal and therefore its status is clear. However, ThePirateBay.org does not provide illegal content, it is just a listing or linking site (not much different than Google in its concept). And blocking access to it, is not much different than blocking access to websites that list organisations that the government of the day does not like.If that was something we heard about from China, we would all be in uproar about the oppressive government.

Find out more about the law that is used to force the Internet block here www.stopsopaireland.com/#3 Worryingly, the same law can be used to block complete access to Facebook, YouTube and all other similar websites if ANYBODY from ANYWHERE in the world ever posted material on these platforms that infringes any copyright. Is the Chinese situation now that far fetched?

What does the ruling mean for you? If you use any of the listed providers for Internet connectivity, you will soon not be able to reach the Pirate Bay website anymore if you are a normal Internet user. However, the decentralised structure of the Internet will mean that a total block is close to impossible for people “in the know”.

And there is another interesting side-effect: The National Broadband Plan in Ireland for which your taxpayer money is used, is TOTALLY overspec’d now. Because 99% of users will never be able to use their super-high-bandwidth Internet connection to the max, if they don’t use it to download illegal material.

Justice, Politics, Society, Taxes, , , , , , , , , ,

Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

The previous government was bad and we all thought that it can only get better, but it is amazing how incompetent and useless the majority of the Irish politicians are. Many were hoping that the Labour Party would give a social component and a balance to the policies of Fine Gael, but then Pat Rabbitte became Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and he just seems to screw up everywhere.

I had hoped that a Labour Party Minister would be a little more careful with Ireland’s Natural Resources, but identical to his Fianna Fail predecessor Rabbitte just gave licenses for oil and gas away for nothing, squandering the few resources that Ireland has and giving them as a present to big commercial companies. But if you thought that was enough of a screw-up you were wrong. Rabbitte, who is also responsible for RTE and is in charge of the TV licence re-organisation is again showing his incompetence. I dare to say that apart from the job holders, nobody thinks the ridiculous salaries in RTE for people like Pat Kenny, Marianne Finucane, Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy etc are justified. Nobody apart from the people themselves AND Pat Rabbitte. Because instead of sorting out RTE, reducing their budget and forcing them to justify their existence, he wants to give them MORE money.

The TV licence fee should be a thing of the past. It might have had its justification when the TV and radio stations were not commercial entities, but RTE is as commercial as TV3, just that RTE delivery in a lot of aspects even worse quality. So, the TV licence fee should be reduced or abolished OR if it stays in place then ALL TV and Radio stations should be allowed to apply for part of the funds and get fair subsidies. It is ridiculous that each household is financing a commercial Radio and TV station with EUR 160 per year.

But it comes worse! People that can’t afford licence fee and cable TV charges etc currently have the option not to have a TV and then don’t need to pay. Rabbitte wants to change that. Probably from around middle of this year he wants to force everybody to pay a “Broadcast fee”. And all that money goes exclusively to RTE! So even if you never in your life watch RTE or listen to RTE, you will have to pay them a minimum of EUR 160 per year. The justification that Rabbitte uses is that we don’t need to have TV anymore to watch RTE. But has he not realised that young generations are not interested in RTE in its current form anymore?

Now, who are the people that currently don’t pay the licence fee and will have to pay it in future? The majority is people that have limited financial means. The rest has a TV and already pays the licence fee. So the Labour Minister has left his social principles and ideologies in the cupboard and instead sides with the rich and overpaid in RTE. Odd!!

Interestingly RTE has estimated that up to 15pc of households do not pay the TV licence fee – even though 99pc of houses allegedly have a TV. So that means the government is incapable of getting the money and for that reason they a new fee is introduced. If the RTE figures are right, then Rabbitte’s argument that the new fee is needed to capture the people that have no TV is a lie. He even claims even those without a TV, benefit from “publicly-funded, public service broadcasting”. Nonsense!
www.independent.ie/irish-news/broadcast-charge-to-hit-all-homes-even-those-with-no-tv-29096806.html
www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/kim-bielenberg-why-the-breaking-bad-generation-wont-pay-rabbittes-broadcast-charge-29098836.html

Politics, Society, Taxes, , ,

Mick Wallace Stole Taxes!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Mick Wallace Stole Taxes!

According to a TV and newspapers, it seems to be clear that Mick Wallace knowingly underdeclared VAT. And in the year he did that or in the year his company went into liquidation, he increased his own salary from EUR 148,141 to EUR 290,000.
That creates an interesting situation, because people that bought apartments from Wallace paid VAT to him, which he was obliged to pass on to the Revenue Commission. Instead passing that money on, he kept it in his company. This sounds like clear theft!
Wallace now claims that he had intended to pay the tax at a later stage and only kept it to save his company and to save jobs. But it is very easy to claim that when you have been found out. There is a good possibility that he would nave never voluntarily given back the VAT. And even if he had genuinely planned to pay it back, it would be unacceptable because VAT belongs to the state, i.e. the tax payers and the state is not a bank for Wallace.

So, it all seems to indicate that he stole money from the state/the tax payers.

To makes things worse and to make his story even less credible, he increased his salary, so he used part of the VAT that he took from apartment buyers and stuffed it into his own pockets. To save the company? To save jobs? No way!

Should Wallace resign! Absolutely!

But we have to ask ourselves what a screwed up parliament we have in Ireland, if the other members don’t have any means to kick him out! …many even think he shouldn’t resign. Are they afraid they might sit in a glass house too and don’t want to be the first to throw the stone?

Politics, Taxes, , , ,

Garlic vs Apartments – Prison for TD Wallace??

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Garlic vs Apartments – Prison for TD Wallace??

Do you remember the big news in March of this year? A food importer had imported garlic (which has a ridiculously high import tax) and declared it as apples. He did that for four years and the fraud allowed him to avoid EUR 1.4mio in VAT. Since 2007 he had paid back half of it, but his case was in front of a court now and he was put in prison for six (!!) years. www.jrnl.ie/379395 Can’t see that making it easier for him to get pay the rest back. In my opinion this verdict is crazy. Sure he should be penalised for his fraud, but six years of prison sentence is just madness.

Fast forward to 08 June 2012. Just 3 months later. Same country. Similar fraud. The elected parliament member TD Mick Wallace was found to have avoided a significant amount of VAT. We don’t know how much, but we know that he agreed to a settlement with the Revenue Commission for a 2.1mio underpayment of VAT over a 2 year period. Wallace is unlike the garlic importer Begley not prepared to pay anything back because his company is insolvent. In an interview he even claimed that he did not break the law, but his company did. Dohhh! This man is a member of the Irish parliament and neither the left wing group he belongs to, nor the Taoiseach is demanding his resignation. They all say it was wrong, but blabber on about it being the decision of the people who elected him, if he should resign or not. www.jrnl.ie/478230 Should Wallace not be thrown into prison too? Maybe for longer than 6 years? If 700k are equivalent to 3 years, then he should get 9 years? No, I don’t think that would be just, but many (including me) would find it just if he was kicked out of the Dail IMMEDIATELY!

Justice, Politics, Society, Taxes, , , , ,
 
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