Army officers face €200 levy to park at 'home'
Thursday November 26 2009
MILITARY officers who live in barracks are being forced to pay a €200 levy for parking their cars outside their front doors.
The officers are caught by a new measure introduced by Finance Minister Brian Lenihan in the 2009 Budget.
The parking levy is a charge on employees for the use of parking facilities provided by an employer. It is restricted to designated urban areas in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford.
The levy, which has not yet been implemented as officials work out how it should be collected, amounts to a €200 flat rate, subject to certain reductions and exemptions.
But the biennial conference of Raco, the representative association for officers in the Defence Forces, heard in Cavan yesterday that an anomaly has arisen where officers are living in and working in the same barracks.
Under Defence Forces regulations, officers must live in barracks after they have been commissioned and must apply for permission to move out.
Raco accepts that the Defence Forces have probably become unwittingly caught up in the parking levy, which is not aimed at them.
But, in practice, it will mean that officers living in McKee and Cathal Brugha barracks in Dublin, Collins in Cork, Renmore in Galway and Sarsfields barracks in Limerick, will have to fork out the levy annually.
Barracks
Defence Forces headquarters delegate Captain Shane Keogh said that for those officers the barracks was essentially their home.
"To impose a levy on officers to park their cars in their de facto homes does not seem very equitable," he told the conference.
"The Defence Forces is unique in the public service in that officers are tasked to both live and work at their station," he added. The conference unanimously passed a motion proposing that they should be exempt from the levy in barracks.
- Tom Brady
Irish Independent
