Ireland Considers Taxing Text Messages

In an announcement that is certain to draw howls of protest, the Irish government has confirmed that it is considering proposals to add a one euro cent tax on text messages. While a cent certainly sounds like a negligible figure, when you take into consideration that there are about 25 million text messages sent daily, it’s certainly a huge figure. The Green Party had originally proposed the tax as early as last year, and claimed that it would raise 1.4 billion Euros for the government, though they revised the figure down to 146 million Euros shortly after. The Irish Cellular Industry which represents phone companies Vodafone, O2, 3 and Meteor is understandably against the idea, and claim that consumers already pay a 21.5% VAT on all phone calls and text messages. Hopefully this will not happen, as it might spark a flurry of taxes for whatever we do on our mobile phones in the future.