The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Sunday, February 12, 2012

waiter there's some invidious anti catholicism in my soup

Coffee with Rontgens.
"Heelers," he proffers holier than thouily, "the Catholic church which you're always defending used to read people's names out from the altar if they didn't contribute enough cash in donations. What have you got to say to that!"
I splutter elegantly into my latte.
"That's not quite what the church is accused of," I explain affably. "If I understand my history, some priests in some parishes did indeed read out people's names from the altar along with the amount of money they had contributed in donations. Oh and there may have been an occasional practice of reading out people's names for having being seen walking out the roads with a young girl unaccompanied. Well call the Feds, Ma Kettle. It's not exactly Aztec ritual sacrifice, is it. Oh the humanity. Supposedly the donations list was read out to pressure people to up their contributions. And that's the sum total of the allegation. Now I want you to consider the way things are done in Ireland today. If anyone so much as dares to open a corner shop and go into business for themselves, they immediately become a target for the government's tax collecting Revenue Commissioners. The same Revenue Commissioners who are much too busy harrying, harassing and casually criminalising the citizenry to bring a single banker or thieving gypsy Drumm or bankrupting gypsy Quinn or kleptocratic gypsy Lenihan to justice for looting and then bleeding white the entire treasury of the nation over the next fifty generations. Much too busy to bring corrupt kleptocrats to justice. But just try opening a corner shop. And here's what they do. They come after you. They invent crimes with which to destroy the reputation of the ordinary citizen who dares to stop drawing the Dole (social welfare payments) in order to try to contribute to his community and provide a dignified living for himself and his family. The Revenue Commissioners come to such impudent would be self reliant workers looking for corporation tax, or VAT tax which they dreamed up in 1970 to force ordinary citizens to become government tax collectors, or PRSI tax if you've had the temerity to hire anyone in your corner shop, and then another zubba zubba tax which they've just thought up for daring to have a radio in your premises. I kid you not. You've to pay a tax in Ireland if you turn on a radio in your premises. Seriously. And if these Revenue Commissioner scoundrels manage to entrap you in one of their arbitrarily invented and applied nouveau taxes, if they manage to trip you up over your own accounts or for some inadvertent error in your wages returns, why then they fine you many many many thousands of dollars, and they imprison you if they wish, and they further humiliate you, oh yes they really do, they further humiliate you to the nth degree, by publicising your situation to the entire country on the front page of the anti Catholic Irish Independent or the front page of the anti Catholic Irish Times. They put you out of business. They drag your name in the mud. For infringing their arbitrarily invented and applied laws, they falsely label you before the eyes of the nation as a tax dodger and a thief and a cheat. And then they publish your name. Everywhere. Not just in a church mate. Everywhere. Oh no indeed. Not just by reading your name from the altar of a country church where your friends and neighbours would laugh at the priest involved and poke you in the ribs, and treat you to a drink. Nay, nay and thrice nay. The Irish government Revenue Commissioners of today, if they can enmesh you in some of their newly invented crimes, will immediately deem you a tax dodger, a vile criminal, a renegade, and publish your name in every newspaper in the land. And these b-----ds are standing with you in judgement on the Catholic Church. Words fail me."

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