Madam, - In his opinion article of August 1st about the public sector, Niall Shanahan of Impact trade union shows an amazing ignorance of how the taxation system works. He claims that public servants make a substantial contribution to the Exchequer through the payment of direct and indirect taxes. In fact, public servants do not contribute one cent to the Exchequer.
Taxes are accumulated only from the private sector. Public sector pay comes from taxes collected from the private sector. When public servants pay taxes, all they are doing is returning some of the money paid to them as wages.
To put it crudely, the public sector is a parasite living off the taxes generated by the private sector.
We have no problem with our taxes going to an efficient public sector but, what annoys us is when we see our taxes going on increased numbers, benchmarking, indexed-linked pensions, etc, and not on health, education and roads, which are crying out for more funding. - Yours, etc,
JOHN MURPHY, Raffeen Bridge, Monkstown, Co Cork.