Northern Ireland Protestants Plan Tax Resistance

From the Lakeland Ledger of :

Protestants seek tax revolt

Hard-line Protestants said they would call on supporters to refuse to pay taxes as part of the campaign of civil disobedience against the Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland.

Leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party, the smaller and more militant of Northern Ireland’s two major Protestant factions, said at their party’s conference they have prepared a tax revolt and will announce details .

The tax revolt, disclosed after the second straight night of Protestant street violence, is part of a campaign against the agreement, which gives the predominantly Catholic Irish Republic a role in the province’s administration.


From the Sarasota Journal:

Viet Critics May Be Slapped In Pocketbook

The Internal Revenue Service threatens to attach salaries or bank accounts of critics of U.S. policy in Viet Nam who refuse to pay their income taxes.

The IRS did not say when it would act, adding it would wait until all facts in each case can be checked. A spokesman says criminal prosecution also is a possibility in such cases.

The IRS made its warning after a Washington newspaper advertisement carried the names of about 350 persons, saying “we will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”

No mention was made by the IRS of a protestor’s failure to file an income tax return. This failure carries penalties of its own — 5 per cent monthly of what is owed, up to a maximum of 25 per cent.

The law also provides a penalty of one year in jail and a $10,000 fine for failing to pay the tax. But the IRS indicated it would rather obtain the taxes owed rather than subject a citizen to criminal prosecution.


The Vote

From the issue of The Vote:

An Echo of Tax Resistance.

Tax Resistance, which was initiated by the Women’s Freedom League in pre-suffrage days as a protest against the violation of one of the principles of our Constitution, that taxation and representation should go together, finds an echo in the obituary notices of Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, the great novelist of India, who died on , at Springfield, Minchinhampton, at the age of eighty-two. In , the first manuscript chapter of “On the Face of the Waters,” a tale of the Mutiny and the Siege of Delhi, was sold under distraint for Income Tax, which she refused to pay “as a protest that, while she was acknowledged to have produced a monument to British heroism and done work for the Empire, she was not capable of putting a mark on a piece of paper in voting.”