Joe Higgins (Socialist Party)

candidate EU elections
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Dear ,

Thank you for the query re who to vote for in areas where the Socialist Party has no candidates. Unfortunately right across Europe there is a huge vacuum on the Left in politics because of the sharp move to the Right and in favour of market capitalism by the Social Democratic and Labour Parties.

That leaves us with the task of building a new mass party for working people but of course we have a problem of non representation in the meantime. What I would do is to see if there was a genuine community or independent candidate and if so vote for him/her. I mean genuine, not somebody waiting to get elected to start horsetrading with the right wing
parties. In the event that there are only right wing candidates I would not
give them any support whatever.

Best wishes,

Joe higgins

Dear ,

Thanks for your letter and query on the bin tax. The bin tax is primarily seen by the Government and Council officials as a revenue gathering exercise rather than an environment measure. That is why in Fingal, for example, as well as a bin tag, householders now also have a yearly charge for recycling and composting. There is now a big push to bring back water charges on the ground of water conservation. This is utter hypocrisy. In the last twelve years hundreds of thousands of new houses have been built without such simple measures for water conservation as dual flush toilets and rainwater tanks being included because the Department of the Environment and Councils did not include such measures in building regulations. Yet they preach that families must pay water charges to ´help conserve water´.

When we fought and defeated water charges in Dublin in 1994, ´95, ´96, we callled back then for such measures to conserve treated water. They did not listen or act. The economic burden that water charges would be on ordinary people was shown when Minister Mary Hanafin said a year ago that if we hadn´t forced their abolition, every household would now be paying between €700 and €800 per year! Lastly with regard to reducing waste and recycling, we believe that most people are very willing got do this out of a sense of responsibility to the environment. People were doing this before they started to charge. In case there was a minority which didn´t give a damn we would have Bye Laws requiring people to separate their waste and having sanctions if anybody didn´t do so. But the biggest changes would be made in manufacturing and retail where we would oblige by law a massive reduction on packaging which is only there to try and make products look better than other products in competition. Hope all this is of some interest and thanks again. Look in my Euro website joehiggins.eu and also the Socialist Party website for more of our ideas. All the best, joe higgins