Why it’s a bit rich of tax-haven Bono to ask us to give to poor

Why it’s a bit rich of tax-haven Bono to ask us to give to poor

By Sharon OwensWednesday, 4 March 2009


While Bono continues to jet around the world making friends with popes and presidents and urging the little people to dig deep for Africa. To be fair to the rest of the band they’ve always been pretty quiet on the subject of charity. But I fear Bono will be wasting his time in the future, urging us to give our loose change to the starving. There won’t be any loose change, Bono. We’ll all need that to buy bread and milk for our children.

Journalists frequently ask me why I didn’t skip across the border when I became a published novelist, in order to take advantage of the Republic’s generous tax breaks for artists, writers and musicians. I understand that most artistes didn’t have to pay any tax at all in the years before the €250,000 limit came into being. Which means that the super-rich became even richer and you couldn’t throw a stone in Dublin without hitting a wealthy writer on the forehead. Fair enough, you might say, and there’s always the ‘trickle-down’ effect. But I didn’t move south for three reasons. Firstly, I was very sentimentally attached to Belfast by the time success came. Secondly, I don’t have any expensive tastes whatsoever. In fact, I’m almost religiously determined not to go down the road of fawning over some overpriced frock or piece of furniture. And thirdly, I believe very strongly in paying my way in this life. My daughter is at school here, my husband and I both got our degrees without having to pay tuition fees, and one or two members of my family have had quite a lot of medical treatment over the years. And somebody has to pay for it all so why should I get off lightly? My job is a lot more enjoyable than, say, cleaning public toilets. So why should a humble lavatory cleaner pay tax while I get a generous tax-break to sit on my backside and daydream?

Yes, it sickens me when the Government squanders our hard-earned money on red tape, pointless wars, and MPs’ travel expenses and second homes. Yes, it disgusts me when people like Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin can retire at 50 with almost £700,000 pension-a-year for life, as a reward for dumping more than £300bn worth of ‘toxic’ debt onto the taxpayer. Not to mention the thousands of workers he sacked along the way to gain his notorious nickname. Yes, it almost leads me to despair to think that every Press release at Stormont could pay for a couple of trainee landscape gardeners to clean up my entire neighbourhood.

But will I be running away to Donegal to batten down the hatches with my wee (five-figure) salary clutched to my chest in a locked tin box? No, I won’t. Because whatever sort of a society is left after the City boys and the Cabinet have finished playing with it, is the society that my child will have to live in. And I don’t want to be part of the reason it all fell apart, if indeed it does.

They were talking on Radio 4 last week about ‘financial Armageddon’. That is, when the UK Government (and possibly many others around the world) will be unable to borrow enough money to pay public sector workers, support the health service and the various social security agencies. Purely because so much of the income of the nation will have to go to service the toxic debts that the current property boom has engendered. So it’ll be bye-bye to that disability car, that Housing Executive flat, those NHS specs and possibly even a large percentage of nursing and teaching jobs.

People are already finding it hard to borrow money, hard to re-pay huge mortgages, hard to afford holidays abroad or new clothes or meals out. And so the domino effect begins. It’s already kicked off with a cluster of luxury restaurants going to the wall. Next will be designer clothes, middle-priced restaurants, DIY stores, small businesses, the car industry and well, the list is endless. Apparently the only things we buy more of in a recession are chocolate and cut-price paperbacks. (Even sales of hardbacks have slumped.)

And when people are cutting back on basic grocery spending to be able to afford home heating oil, they’ll have no option but to turn their heads away from TV pictures of African children dying of hunger and thirst and the lack of a mosquito net that costs £3. And they’ll probably have little time for super-rich celebrities and their luxury villas in the south of France and their Maserati sportscars and their various lectures on how important it is to give money to charity. I suspect the entire charity ball circuit will collapse as will the gossip magazine industry. Expensive resorts such as Monte Carlo and Cannes could become ghost towns. We’ll all be spending our weekends growing carrots and cabbages in the back garden instead of lapping up the outrageous extravagances of our favourite stars. Even the Oscars have allegedly done away with their six-figure goody bags.

Oh dear, Bono, if things get any worse there’ll simply be no use in letting your stubble grow, donning that sexy black waistcoat and biker boots, and begging the little people to give their money to charity. For, as the man says, charity begins at home.