It is going to be a problem for the campaign if there is a fairly high compliance rate. The minority who dont can be more easily portrayed as “spongers”, which the establishment will slowly but remorselessly try to do.
What happened with domestic bin charges in Dublin was that at first when they were brought in everybody said that they were an outrage, people who claimed that would never pay them were told “Good on ye..Stand up to the basturds…”
But within a few years those self-same people were saying ..”Well, I know you dont like paying them, but everybody else has to…it is not fair on those who do if you dodge it…” etc.
Also, the urban rural divide can be used ..in the bin charges it was all those people who phoned in to Joe Duffy (or whatever) to say “well, here in Roscommon, we have ALWAYS had to pay to get somebody to take our rubbish, no town water pipe for us, no sirreee…” ( I always wondered why it didnt occur to them to agitate for their Co.Co. to bring in bin collection, but anyways…).
In a group conversation I was in recently where I live in Dublin, when the LPT came up, people bitched for a while about the imposition of it “all for the IMF”, and then somebody mentioned the fact that compliance was particularly bad in Donegal…straight away the conversation moved on to arguing that if Donegal wasn’t paying its “fair share” they damn well better not get any central government money to compensate, etc.
The whole tenor of conversations I have had generally on the property tax, then LPT, (including in my workplace – government employee here), never seemed to follow script one would take from reading Cedar Lounge over the last 18 months. Resistance to it really seemed pretty resigned, to be honest.