@roinnslainte & Stephen Donnelly received the Meenan Report in 2020. Rather than read it & implement they decided to produce another report chaired by a defendent in a negligence case & excluding patients/negligence victims. HSE/DOH/NTMA & a director of Merrion Fetal private only

Only reason Ireland doesnt win every Superbowl & baseball "world series" is our best athletes choose rugby & hurling over american football & baseball!

If u file a complaint against a HSE doctor or nurse they potentially face public FTP hearings & loss of license. In contrast @HSELive & @roinnslainte management "investigate" themselves if at all.

Lack of oversight of permanent health service management is astonishing. Doctors/nurses face public FTP inquiries yet health spending continues to spiral with zero consequences for senior @roinnslainte & @HSELive management

if this doesn’t bring a tear to your eye then you ain’t got no heart! thanks to the creator russ @thedigitalassembly

will @EamonRyan & @smytho take responsibility for the disastrous impact of their scheme on DCC workers ? @greenparty_ie should be put on litter collection duty in Dublin 1.

Why is @roinnslainte Secretary General Robert Watt being rewarded for this out of control health spending with a role as head of dublin city task force ?

A new law proposed by Fianna Fáil TD Albert Dolan would allow the public to track state spending from tender to final payment. businesspost.ie/politics/new…

Time for tax cuts, after almost two decades of confiscatory rates. Latest column. thecurrency.news/articles/22…

We’re now working on Public Spend Tracker 2.0, designed to be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. The goal is to create a “golden thread” across public spending: linking procurement, contracts, tenders, awards and payments so that any payment can be traced back to the original contract. That level of transparency is where real insight comes from. The ambition is simple: if the State spends over €100bn a year, improving outcomes by even 1% would make a real difference to people’s lives. I also wrote about a new way to think about public spending and accountability. Read here: open.substack.com/pub/albert… Link to Current Tracker: datastudio.google.com/s/kwOm…

We talk constantly about “value for money” in public spending, but there’s no shared understanding of what that actually means. For most people, it means: Did this need to be done, and could it have been done for less? Inside the system, it often means: Did we follow the process? I wrote about a new way to think about public spending and accountability. Read here: open.substack.com/pub/albert…

Lots of issues discussed, but mostly tax. Past time some of the most punitive personal tax rates in the world were slashed. They were put in place to address a budgetary crisis that was solved more than a decade ago. podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcas…

2/4 Current spending growth has increased to 9.3%, well above the Budget 2026 forecast of growth of 6.3%, and also ahead of the recent Annual Progress Report forecast of 6.9%. If this pace of spending growth continues, it would result in significant spending overruns.

Ireland has the fifth highest marginal income tax rate in the OECD for workers on the average wage. Almost half of every extra euro earned after just €44,000 is taken by the by the government. These confiscatory rates, which were introduced 18 years ago to address a fiscal crisis that is long over, crush the incentive to work more. Ireland is the red bar in the OECD chart below. thecurrency.news/articles/22…

Cost of living concerns surge in today's poll and is the biggest issue. A year ago (the second chart) it was the third most salient issue for voters. It's more than curious that the government does not address concerns about immigration - consistently among voters' top three concerns - by saying it will limit student and worker visas owing to capacity constraints, housing, healthcare etc. The constituency in favour of continued high rates of immigration is likely to tiny - language school owners, some employers and fringe, open border ideologues.

Excellent chart showing marginal personal tax rates in Ireland. Worth noting that the self employed pay an additional 3% above €100k bringing their marginal rate to 55%. Makes so much sense that those embodiements of neoliberalism - people who works for themselves - have to pay more tax than a public sector worker who faces no risk to income, enjoys sick leave etc. Pro-enterprise governments since 2008?

Lots of folk paying top rate of tax and no hope of putting enough together to get a mortgage. Some can't even afford the rent so they go to Oz 🇦🇺 where rents are also high but you can earn twice as much before you pay the top rate of tax. More money on pocket=having a life

The income tax started at 1 percent in 1913, sold to Americans as a modest levy on only the wealthiest citizens. The Sixteenth Amendment passed with assurances that rates would remain low and the burden light. Watch the cascade unfold. By 1917, the top rate hit 67 percent to fund World War I. Politicians promised reductions after the war ended. Instead, they discovered the intoxicating revenue stream of mass taxation. The "temporary" wartime rates became the new baseline. The 1920s brought modest cuts, then the Depression triggered another explosion. FDR pushed the top rate to 79 percent in 1936, then 94 percent during World War II. Each crisis provided the perfect excuse for expansion. Each expansion became permanent. The tax code grew from 14 pages in 1913 to over 70,000 pages today. The real genius lies in withholding, introduced in 1943 as another "temporary" wartime measure. No more writing painful lump-sum checks to the government. Instead, they take your money before you even see it. Compliance becomes automatic. Resistance becomes impossible. Most Americans celebrate their annual "refund" without recognizing they gave the government an interest-free loan all year. The psychological manipulation runs deeper still. Tax preparation transforms citizens into supplicants, begging for deductions and credits the government graciously allows. Complexity creates dependence on experts who profit from the maze. The IRS employs more agents than the FBI and CIA combined. Started with 1 percent on the rich. Ended with a surveillance apparatus that monitors every transaction, confiscates wealth before you earn it, and conditions entire populations to accept theft as civic duty.

Ireland’s SME are ranked Lowest in EU as government seems to waffle and despise SME’s / growth. We need a serious mindset shift to move away from status quo and a country that’s growth is solely about SMe’s, creatives & caring. Any MNC is upside, but policy focus on SME’s.

Sweden scrapped its inheritance tax in 2005 which seems to have led family firms to raise investments and profits leading to increased tax revenue for the state. The rest of the world should look closely at the Swedish example. hhs.se/en/about-us/news/sse/…

Important to recall that cuts to punitive personal tax rates, after 18 long years at emergency levels, would funds themselves in large part. Allowing people to keep more of their own money incentivises work, therefore more tax revenue.