I recently bought a return ticket to Glasgow, (triple crown winning rugby match, attending, purpose thereof). It was, of course, with Ryanair, because I am paying for the trip myself (a novel and uncomfortable sensation for any journalist; the equivalent for the rest of you of removing a red hot light bulb with your tongue). The cost of the ticket was £60 return (which is of course high by Ryanair standards, laughably cheap by anyone else's). But government taxes of £16.49 brought the air fare to £76.49. I suppose I shouldn't find this surprising. We are so used to being taxed at every possible turn that we no longer bleat, whimper or even notice. We live in a quite astonishing society in which the primary function of the economy is to raise revenue for the civil service to spend on itself. For example, I don't know what the Department of Defence actually does - but you can be perfectly sure that throughout the pay crisis in the Army in the 1980s, when soldiers were being so badly paid that they and their families had to go on supplementary welfare, the civil servants in their offices in Dublin were not enduring such penury.
Mutiny by litigation
The scandal of army pay lit a long fuse; that fuse is now exploding in the law courts in the various compensation cases being taken by soldiers who for the most part are veterans of that period. In effect, what we are seeing is an orderly, law-abiding, mutiny-by-litigation.
I raise the matter of the Army here because the first thing any sensible state does is to protect the means by which the state is to be defended. But not in Ireland; the first item on the expenditure is the civil service, permanent, pensionable and index-linked, which did not live in rat-infested hovels on the Curragh as did the men of the Defence Forces and their families, but merely superintended those hovels.
The culture of the civil service is, like an Ottoman vizier, to tax economic activity as if it were a vice. The price to be paid for that kind of lunacy was paid in the 1980s, when hundreds of millions fled the country in illicit foreign investments, even as billions were borrowed in order to sustain economically the economically unsustainable. What National Irish Bank did in facilitating the squirrelling away of vast fortunes into offshore accounts made daylight-sense to the individuals who owned that money, as opposed to obeying the law, and seeing their earnings, their future and their pensions confiscated by the Government for Government pensions.
We were damn nearly taken over by the IMF at one stage; and economic growth since then has only been made possible by the creation of tax-loopholes for the investing rich and the investing foreigner. This state is now engaged in a vast and probably criminal double-taxation system which permits the many foreign executives who work full-time here to be taxed offshore. Equally, while personal taxation for Irish citizens remains ruinously high, our corporation tax is the lowest in the EU. Our growth is only a native phenomenon in our possession of a young, well-trained workforce: of at least equal important is our role as a manufacturing aircraft carrier able to parachute Japanese and US goods into the wealthiest single market in the entire world.
Seeds of state profligacy
And no, I am not digressing from my air-fare to Glasgow: for we have in the taxation on that air-fare the seeds of future state profligacy. Apparently unable to proceed with the insane plan to charge a £3 per night levy on hotels and guest-houses, the state is now proposing to add a £3 capitation fee on airfares, bringing the total tax to £20 on a return flight, even though the Government is already probably making more out of each incoming passenger than the airlines carrying them. The (supposed) purpose of this capitation tax is to invest in the promotion and infra-structure of the Irish tourist industry. It will be by all incomers, even Irish citizens returning home. Even if the moneys were put aside for the stated purpose (which it won't be: do you not see the massive, all-consuming, index-linked alligator of civil service pensions waddling across the swamp to get its teeth around that juicy morsel capitation beside the riverbank?) that would be insanity. We already have more tourists than we can cope with; to attract more to experience delightful shop assistants hurl their shopping past the scanner like a terrier clearing a cellarful of rats and be waited on by restaurant waiters who think John Dorey is a rock musician is positively certifiable conduct.
The US has not got everything right; but it has got so much right we might prosper from its example. Administration after administration has gone down the low-taxation road, and the result has been the biggest economic growth is the history of the world. We have effectively linked ourselves with that growth; we are an offshoot of the US economy, and in order to manage to become this, we permit US executives here enjoy US rates of taxation.
Instinct to tax
But the instinct of our politicians and our civil servants is to tax, tax, tax; even when it is not legal, which is very likely the case for both our present airport taxes and our proposed ones, both of which discriminate against airborne travel from within the EU, but not airborne travel within the state. The discrimination is not merely confined to that: it is conceivable that a taxation of aircraft flights and not travel by means train or car or bus is a discriminatory intervention in the market - why should the train-passenger from Belfast to Dublin not pay a tax which the aircraft passenger, travelling the same journey from one state to another, have to pay?
Will there be uproar over the proposals to tax incoming flights? Probably not. We have a political culture of acceptance which tolerated Charlie Haughey when the entire nation not merely knew what he was up to, but largely applauded it. Left to our own devices, we once before nearly taxed ourselves into the poor-house. Left to their own devices and their own instincts, our civil service and our political masters would do the same again. The issue is not £3. The issue is the wedge, thin end of.