Patrick King of Dublin City Chamber and I presented a paper to the Dublin Economics Workshop this year about how we could match a property tax with local expenditure so that it doesn’t become a transfer mechanism or general revenue raiser.

It would put power into local authorities, maximise incentives to do things in a cost efficient manner, and make it fair and relevant locally so that you aren’t comparing values of a house in Dublin 4 with one up a mountain in Lietrim.

By having no relationship to the actual costs of running a local authority we will instead opt for something that is bound to cause trouble in the future… the presentation is here.

We are going to publish a full paper in time, we never did get a chance to move to a more serious platform with the research, but what it did do (at least for us) was spell it out loud and clear that different areas have different costs and those costs must be recouped, if any area city or rural has a cost that is incurred for their own benefit then they should pay for it, plain and simple.