“According to the report by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI), the average cost of building a three bedroom, semi-detached house in the greater Dublin area is €330,000. The construction costs, or ‘hard costs,’ come to €150,000, amounting to less than half (45pc) of the total cost of building the house.”
The article goes on to explain that another €57,000 is needed to buy the site, to which you’d have to say, ‘fair enough.’ After all, you can’t build the damn thing in the suspended animation. But that still leaves €123,000 of the buy price unaccounted for, which is over a third of it. Well, there’s €39,000 in VAT and that’s pure taxation for wanting somewhere to live. The other €38,000 is the gross margin for the seller on the deal.
So let’s put that in bullet points for the average home in Dublin this month.
√ €330,000 to buy it, (100%) √ €57,000 for the land it stands on, (17%) √ €150,000 to build it, (45%) √ €39,000 to the Government for doing nothing at all, (12%). √ €38,000 margin for the seller, (11%).
Now I’m no accountant but leaving aside the land and building costs, the other ‘soft costs’ mentioned in the article still only come to €134,000. Yet they say the soft costs amount to €180,000. If so, where did the other €46,000 go to. Try borrowing just €46,000 on its own over 30 years and you’ll end up paying back €373,358 so it isn’t exactly peanuts.
Well, you must expect the legal profession to have its snout in the trough especially with all that conveyancing flying about. Then there is the original property tax that is still applied. For the benefit of overseas readers, we have what’s called ‘Stamp Duty’ or a tax on the transaction of 1% of the sell price. It was a property tax imposed by the founders of the State and it’s still there but a few ago they decided to apply a second property tax annually as well. They tried to do that kind of double-taxation with water but met a revolution and dropped the idea. Still in the case of the €330,000 house here, they already bagged €38,000 in value added tax and will get 1%, or €3,300 in stamp duty as well from the impoverished buyer. Given the Government bags so much from the citizens basic needs, it is no wonder they desire to overheat the property market.
The final irony is the interest on the loan for €330,000 for an average house in Dublin payable over 30 years at a fixed 7%. The piggy in the middle, the buyer, will work hard to pay back a whopping €2,678,444 to the lender. And that is for a site worth €57,000 and a building cost of €150,000. It’s €207,000 worth of house for almost €2.7million in repayments.
Just how hot would this Government like the property market to get?
Each year since 1978, on the October weekend, Cork hosts the Guinness Jazz Festival. It’s actually a fantastic four days of music, beer and craic. The city is flooded with visitors from all over the world and the locals too turn out in their droves.
The headlining acts play in the Opera House and the Metropole Hotel becomes the Festival Club. But the majority of the gigs are free. They create what they call, “the Jazz Trail,”which is simply a list of the pubs hosting live bands around the city, usually about fifty of them. Typically, a pub will have a lunchtime band, another will kick off between three and four in the afternoon and this band will play the eight ’til late slot. So you can imagine then, there’s a lot of great gigs to find all free of charge.
Even the Festival Club in the ‘Met,’ offers free gigs up to seven in the evening. You can start in the main bar at 11.00am each morning. At one ‘o clock, three other acts take to the stages upstairs while a fifth one sets up in the main bar. Then for the afternoon, there are four gigs playing and they are replaced with four more in mid afternoon and then a further four acts take you up to seven-ish. Throughout the day, guest artists from other bands are invited on stage to play with the perfuming bands. It’s spontaneous, loud and damned energetic.
Naturally with the massive influx of visitors, bed-nights are at a premium. For a couple of years the Festival organizers even hired huge car ferries to sit in the river very close to the city centre to help with the accommodation needs. Outlying towns like Cobh in the East, Kinsale in the South and Ballincollig in the West all feature hotels and guest houses full of festival goers at Jazz time. But at any time in Cork, hotel beds are in short supply.
I was mildly interested then when a company called “Sick & Sore,” lodged a planning permission with the City Fathers to berth a Boatel, or hotel on boat, right up river beside the City Centre. The 105-metre long ‘My Story’ cruise ship, which has cruised along the Rhine and Danube, is costing Sam Corbett, sole director of Sick & Sore, a cool €1.75m. It can accommodate 156 people when full and has the usual bars and restaurants as you might expect. Over the last several years the Cork Harbour Commissioners have moved, (almost), all shipping from the upper harbour to the lower harbour, fifteen miles away. They built bigger berths for bigger ships and can handle to to fifteen million tones p/a. This though has left the vast city quays empty so there is loads of room for this small 105m luxury cruise vessel on the North channel. On a personal note, I think a boatel is a novel idea.
But it wouldn’t be Ireland without some self-serving prick lobbing in an objection. Brian O’Mahony, a resident from the Wellington Rd area, has lodged an appeal against the boatel. Now, Wellington Road is a goodly distance away from the proposed Penrose Quay berth and the little boat will not be visible from anywhere on his street, so I wondered what was bothering the lad.
Get this! “He said that the decision to grant permission for the hotel was contrary to the North Docks local area plan which provides for new bridges (pedestrian and vehicular) further downstream from the hotel’s proposed mooring berth.” Well Brian, if that should happen the boat need only move down to the Horgan’s Wharf or Water Street less than half a mile away. They’re both empty. And if the worst comes to the worst, she can berth in Tivoli, miles from any bridges.
“Mr O’Mahony claimed the construction of these bridges would make it impossible for the vessel to access dry-dock facilities for mandatory maintenance.” Again Brian, ships have engines that amazingly, allow them to move about! “Other problems would be encountered with the bedrooms used by hotel guests as many would face into the quay wall at low tide, Mr O’Mahony said.” Ah! What about pulling the curtains? What’s this lad smoking? “He also claimed there is an inadequate set-down area provided at Penrose Quay to accommodate hotel guests and well as goods and services vehicles. Mr O’Mahony said the location of the set-down area would also obstruct plans for a cycle path along the quay.” There’s acres of a set-down area at the berth and fuck the cyclists.
Traditionally in this country, objectors to developments are either not-in-my-backyard merchants or in it for what they can get so I have no time for this guy. But Sam Corbett, of Sick and Sore, has a bit of form in the area of marine catering. He was involved in the removal of the “Cill Airne,” a ship that sat rusting on Cork’s South Custom House Quay for many years. That ship was refurbished and sits now on the Liffy in Dublin as a floating restaurant. That project has worked well so I do hope his cute boatel idea for Cork goes ahead too. I won’t be staying on it but I reckon for visitors to the Jazz Festival, it would be a brilliant spot to get the head down.
Many non-smokers in the last few years have sneered openly at the smoker’s plight. This self-righteous brigade of nannies have ensured tobacco prices are raised year on year and this in turn saw the explosion in black market tobacco.
Excluding smokers from the pubs and bars on the shaky pretext of saving the lives of barmen has seen a pub a day close in Ireland with the resultant redundancy of a lot of healthy barmen. This absence of pubs, particularly in rural areas, has had the knock effect of changing the social lives of whole areas and led in turn to a dramatic increase in home drinking and loneliness.
There has been many suggestions from elsewhere in the world that the Pharmaceutical Industry was behind all of it. The theory goes that they invested millions into the development of alternative nicotine delivery systems such as gums and patches and sold these through the traditional chemist’s shops. Despite heavy advertising though, the take-up was pathetic. Smokers bought cigarettes because that is what they wanted with their own money. Big Pharma was left with a dilemma. Do we take a bit hit and drop these products or do something to force smokers to buy them. So the greasing of palms in both politics and medicine begat an anti-smoking movement lavishly funded to agitate for laws to make smoking difficult and unattractive.
And it was all going to plan as well until something unforetold happened. A little Chinaman tinkered around in his garage trying to make something look, taste and operate like a cigarette but without the unwanted dangers of real burning tobacco. The electronic cigarette was born. By the time it came here, our Government had tobacco products completely overtaxed and we had the most expensive cigarettes in the EU. Still the pharmaceutical nicotine stuff wasn’t selling despite the endless doctor’s referrals in that direction. When tax revenue from tobacco fell due to smokers switching to the black market, the answer was always to put up the tax further.
Then in a quite natural organic way, smokers began to drift towards experimenting with the new-fangled e-cig. It began slowly but then quickly gathered pace. As this was going on the Government had just hidden tobacco from view in the shops and was working on a law to insist the boxes containing it must become ugly and grotesque. Guys like me continued to smoke but whenever I went out, I used the e-cig. In public, the Government put on a united anti-tobacco face but in private, they were concerned at the falling revenue from legal tobacco sales. It was a nice little annual earner yielding one-and-a-half billion a year to them but this had begun to edge down.
Speaking on behalf of the Government though, Public Health and the charities assured the public that this loss of tobacco tax to the State was a very good thing. People were living longer into old age and the two parties saying all of this were still raking in the Pharma and grant monies to carry on their crusade. The six-figure salaries were not in doubt for them. But the big cloud on the horizon was the collapsing health service. Old people are always getting sick and the more of them there are, the worse it is for the HSE, despite their protestations.The hospitals call these old non-smokers bed-blockers.
The other big cloud for the Pharmaceutical Industry, Public Health and the charities were those damned e-cigs. Unable to find a problem with these things they adopted instead a tactic of hinting darkly at the possible dangers of their long term use. It was a fabricated rumour without substance of course. What was really driving them crazy though was the sheer numbers of people who were quitting smoking and turning voluntarily to the humble e-cigarette instead of buying the expensive, useless Pharma products. The whole point of the anti-smoking scam from day one was to re-direct the smoker’s buying power, of two billion euros a year, away from the Tobacco Companies and over to the Pharmaceutical Industry. That was to be the big pay-off.
But that, “nicotine war,” discovered how effective the third entrant to it could be. You see, the Tobacco Companies thought they could depend on addiction to guarantee sales while the Pharmaceutical Industry used the blunt instrument of paid for laws to command the smoker to comply. The e-cig allowed the smoker free will and choice, thus its popularity.
Fast forward to today and the Tobacco Companies are embracing the e-cig and even coming up with safer tobacco products themselves while still offering the traditional smoke. The Pharmaceutical Industry is fuming at Government and its other partners as more and more smokers try an e-cig for themselves or still buy black market cigarettes. But the big losers are the Revenue Commissioners. The annual take for tobacco in 2016 was down to around one-point-one billion, (a drop of €400M in one year), and they are forecasting a further fall this year. With a doctor in charge of the country facing his first budget next month, any fall in revenue from the usual places is worrying. But there’s a problem for Taoiseach Leo. A further increase in tobacco prices will bring the yield from tobacco products further down rather than up, as the Revenue Commissioners have repeatedly warned.
While e-cigs are subject to VAT like everything else, they are still a cheaper alternative when it comes to satisfying your desire for nicotine and you can vape in all the better pubs too. But the big win for the Government, if they haven’t been hypocritical all along about their concern for smoker’s health, is that finally smokers are switching to something 99% safer, their e-cigs.
So I was shocked to read in The Sun that officials in the Department of Finance are advising Paschal Donohoe that, “One way to raise money would be to extend the tax on tobacco to e-cigarettes. The briefing doc points out that smoking is in decline and so tax income is expected to fall.” But this war on tobacco was never about revenue, we were told. It was always solely a health issue to protect up all from the dangers of smoke, firsthand and second. Are they now proposing to stop us quitting smoking or heavily penalize us for trying?
Let me explain the money angle here. In Ireland, a packet of twenty cigarettes pre-tax would cost you €2.38 but then €8.62 is added in combined taxation.The equivalent of twenty cigarettes in e-cig form is a €2.00 cartridge. If they tax this as a tobacco product, an e-cig cartridge will shoot up to €10.70!!! Twenty cigarettes on the ever available black market is about €4.00 so this new proposal is a huge tax on opting to be healthy and a strong incentive to get back to smoking the real thing.
If this is the course Doctor Varakar gives his blessing to in next month’s budget then you’ll know once and for all that their priority is money and not health. You will know for sure that this whole anti-tobacco crusade from the smoking ban to plain packs was, and still is about money and nothing else.
Oh! And the price of social engineering to date has been five hundred million euros and rising…………
Getting to and from the boozer is not what it used to be. There was a golden age where you drove to the pub, had a few scoops and drove home happy. Indeed, few long journeys were completed by car without a couple of such pitstops along the route.
Then came the hideous smoking ban and within a week, the pubs went quieter by half. Still reeling from this, the publicans were hammered again. The drink limit was lowered and then lowered again. The Gardai were incentivised to set up checkpoints near pubs at night and even during daylight hours. The big losers were the rural publicans because of little or no local transport services hence their dependence on the motor car.
The notorious idiot Shane Ross wanted to take it even further. Where before a pint and a half of beer was considered safe to drive, he made even a half-pint dodgy. Already a half of all rural pubs are gone and those remaining only open after six in the evening with some only opening on weekend nights. This has devastated the rural community spirit all over the land and led to lonely binge drinking on the isolated farms.
There are Irish Pubs springing up in countries all over the world and word has it they are well liked concept. Meanwhile back in Ireland our own Government seem intent on closing all of ours. Publicans, particularly those in rural communities, put forward a suggestion that they should get some Government assistance to ferry their customers to and fro. Actually, it was Ross himself in a throwaway remark who suggested that if they were so concerned about their clientele then the publicans should fetch their customers in their own cars.
So the Vintners came back with a plan to do just that. They did not demand money to purchase a fleet of mini-buses nor suggest the Government sponsor half-price cars for this purpose. All they asked for was some kind of a tax break to offset the added costs involved. All they asked for was a reduction in Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) or a rebate on fuel costs. The blustering buffoon that is Ross has shot that down. Instead he waffled about meeting them and facilitating them meaning he has no intention of doing a fucking thing. He argued the vintners say they want to help save lives too. “If they are sincere about it let them get together with the insurance company and others and facilitate their customers by ensuring that they get home safely,” he said.
And because pompous Minister Ross is so divorced from the reality the rest of have to live with regarding the punitive cost of Irish motoring due to over-taxation, the windbag actually added, “We’re not talking about large expenditure. We’re talking about common sense.” The words ‘common sense’ coming from that mouth is truly ironic because he hasn’t a shred of it. He’s scraping around frantically now for something he can point at as an achievement because he knows that, having seen him in power, his electorate will not be fooled twice by the man. He’s desperate to have something done where he can take the credit for it in the vain hope of re-election.
Personally I believe the only memory of him we will have in ten years time will be his sterling efforts to increase rural suicides and denude the countryside of people.
