Take it off them!
national |
anti-capitalism |
other press 
Tuesday July 31, 2007 16:50
by Clive Sullish - -
33,000 millionaires
According to a report published by the Bank of Ireland, there are now more millionaires per head of the population in our little republic than in the USA.
Fully 33,000 Irish residents are dollar millionaires – and these are not little old lads and ladies made notionally rich by increasing property prices, for the ‘primary’ residence was not taken into account by the Bank when it was drawing up its hit list. Meanwhile, 285,000 people are surviving on less than 190 euros a week.
Even the Irish Independent is appalled by what it describes as this ‘gaping gulf in wealth’.
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/anger-as-gaping....html
Is it not time that somebody demanded a little bit of redistribution - that we take their millions from them? Not Labour, it seems, for that party’s anodyne response is to criticise the government for ‘ignoring the most vulnerable’.
And it is a rather hypocritical position, because if are to be guided by Labour’s taxation policy in the recent election, they themsleves favour ignoring the least vulnerable, and their vast wealth. ‘Fleece the rich’ might have proved to be a more electorally popular policy than ‘Give your next preference to FG’. As a slogan, it might well be enough to reverse Sinn Fein’s recent setback.
If these parties, and the Greens indeed, remain as afraid now to take on vested interests as they manifestly were two months ago, they might advise the rich that a sacrifice now would be for their own good (The rest of us are used to being told that).
The fact is that millionaires are being killed by their wealth. According to the Irish Times (31/08/07), the Department of Transport’s chief investigator attributes the great rise in air traffic accidents to the great increase in the number of helicopters and private planes.