Sir, - Tadhg B. Kearney (August 13th) claims that in my article of August 4th I advocated "a return to the failed high-tax policies of the 1980s".
Expenditure cuts and high taxes were, of course, temporarily necessary in that period in order to halve borrowing as a share of GNP from a threatened 21.5 per cent in 1982, (a situation brought about by the disastrous spending policies of the 1977-1981 government), to 10.9 per cent in 1987 - a figure later reduced further by the 1987-1989 Government.
Far from advocating high taxation, my article showed how it proved possible as well as desirable to reduce spending and taxation as a share of GNP between 1993 and 2000 - in the case of spending, cutting the share of GNP it absorbed by as much 10 percent age points of GNP. My point was simply that considerable damage was done to the social fabric and to the efficiency of our public services by further ideological cuts in the spending share beyond that point - cuts that were made in order to double the personal tax cuts that had been made possible during this period by the increased yield of corporate taxation.
Incidentally, Mr Kearney uses the usual right-wing ploy of equating social provisions with unemployment, suggesting indeed that almost all social needs can be met by creating jobs. He conveniently ignores the fact that barely one-tenth of social transfers take the form of unemployment payments. The rest is required for needs which he is content to ignore - pensions and free travel for the old and widowed; child benefit; help for the disabled and incapacitated and for people with occupational injuries; residential care; supplementary welfare for the destitute, and so on.
Of course I don't advocate increasing our public spending to Continental levels; indeed, I made no suggestion for higher taxation or for any increase in the present share of GNP devoted to public spending. Instead, I simply pointed out that the buoyancy of revenue at present tax rates over the next eight years, if it were to be deployed to improve our public and social services rather than squandered on reducing our already very low tax take even further, could be sufficient to resolve most of our social and infrastructural problems.
It is a pity that Mr Kearney didn't bother to read what I actually wrote.
I note the comments of Eoin Ryan TD (August 16th). I greatly respect his personal commitment to social action, especially in relation to drug problems, for which I am glad he has been given responsibility. And I am encouraged by the fact that so much of the financial commitments in the National Plan, to which he refers, are to be applied to social provisions. This suggests - as I commented last Saturday - that we may be about to see a belated swing away from the right-wing policies of the recent past.
But I have to remind him that if governments in recent years had not diverted funds away from social purposes in order to double tax cuts, we would now have another £2 billion available to tackle problems of poverty. - Yours, etc.,
Garret Fitzgerald, Dublin 6.