The Dossing Times

Leo Varadkar raised the spectre of tax individualisation the other day. Some have talked about Leo Varadkar being lonely I will focus on the idea of tax individualisation. Tax individualistion was a hot topic around the 1999 budget. The idea was basically rather then taxing a married couple as a couple they would tax the individuals thus reducing the [...]

Simon is back to fine posting form on the blog, which I am happy to see. Life is busy but good for me away from the blog at the moment, so much so that I got a Christmas card from Simon and his girlfriend this year, a proper, made of paper, written in pen Christmas [...]

In Fridays Independent Dearbhail McDonald wrote an opinion piece.
Justice must be done — and be seen to be done
PUBLICITY is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. So said the English jurist and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham in 1843.
Although the public’s understanding [...]

A friend of mine has a new blog Fuzzy Times. http://fuzzytimes.wordpress.com/ check it out.

There was an interesting side in the Irish Times.

60% have lost jobs in architectural firms
As many as 60 per cent of employees at architectural practices in Ireland have lost their jobs over the past two years, according to a new survey undertaken by the recruitment firm Hays.
In Dublin, the figure is slightly higher with 61 [...]

Interesting press release today.
Fine Gael Seanad Justice Spokesperson, Senator Eugene Regan, has lodged a formal objection to NAMA with the EU Commission in Brussels, saying the ‘scale and scope’ of the scheme is disproportionate to the size of the Irish economy, transfers too much risk from the banks onto the Irish taxpayer and does not [...]

The NUI system is going to be dissolved.

The Minister for Education and Science, Batt O’Keeffe TD, is to dissolve the National University of Ireland (NUI).
Minister O’Keeffe acknowledged the important role the NUI has played in Irish education for more than a century.
‘However, the central role of the NUI was significantly reduced in the Universities Act, 1997, [...]

What does a Park named after a bishop who covered up child sex abuse , a statue to a terrorist who sought the help of the Nazis and Dublin Housing estates have in common?
A while back I was having a debate with a friend of mine over the statue to Sean Russell that sits in [...]

The latest Eurostat data on the at risk of poverty rate is out as a percentage of the total population for 2008.

Ireland is 10th in the list with the UK 13th. The average is 15.2% with Ireland on 16% and the UK on 19%. The data also tells us about the Median Income of a country. Relative poverty is [...]