What privacy laws? Pay your TV licence!
While the country was talking about Garth Brooks last week, Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte was carrying out one final derisory act before being unceremoniously dropped from Cabinet.
In a move designed to anger anyone interested in protecting even the most basic privacy laws, he secured Cabinet approval for a new measure which will allow An Post to access Sky and UPC subscription data.
The aim is simple. If you’ve got a subscription, then you must have a television. Which means you should be paying your licence fee.
Forget that RTE doesn’t represent the views of a large section of society.
Forget that most people don’t consider the €160 yearly licence fee to be worth it, considering the questionable quality of many RTE-funded programmes.
Forget that this move represents a direct attempt to contravene our Data Protection Laws, something that doesn’t seem to trouble the Cabinet.
It should trouble us.
Pat Rabbitte may be gone from Cabinet, but the Labour Party will keep pressing on with the only thing it’s interested in – pressuring people to pay more and more taxes when they’re hardly able to feel their families and hold on to the family home.
This has to stop. Roll on 2016, when we can make the changes this country sorely needs.