We’re generally resigned to the fact that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. But it seems a bit unfair that, unlike every other mortal travail, taxes continue to be a certainty even after you die.

As far as the cold hand of the Revenue is concerned, being dead is no excuse for avoiding further liability to the taxman – they’ll reach right into your coffin and hit you with a bill for inheritance tax.

The next time anyone asks what you think happens after you die, you can tell them you know one thing that definitely happens: the Revenue comes after you, waving one of those scary brown ‘harp’ envelopes, for a slice of your worldly possessions.

While inheritance tax ends up being paid by the people you leave behind, it’s very much a tax on you, on your savings, on your property, on the things you worked a lifetime to acquire.

It’s a tax on your hopes for your children and grandchildren, and on the sacrifices you made to have something worthwhile to pass on to them.

It’s a tax on top of the taxes you’ve already paid in attaining whatever you own at death, such as stamp duty, income tax, property tax, VAT, carbon tax, USC, motor tax, and any other tax that the State imposed on whatever you earned or bought throughout your life.

And when it comes to taxing the people who inherit the house you leave in your will, it’s a levy entirely incurred by the incompetence of successive Governments in allowing property prices to spiral in a grievously under-supplied market.

Over the weekend, I looked at the latest list of wills, published in the Sunday papers, mainly to see if I know anyone who might have left me a few bob. But at a glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’re a country of millionaires, with ordinary folk with ordinary addresses regularly leaving seven-figure estates. However, the strong likelihood is that the majority of these estates of around €1million represent the value of a house that the deceased testators almost certainly bought years earlier for a fraction of that sum.

The fact that they’ve now got an estate worth over a million, on paper at least, rarely reflects the reality of their lives, and certainly doesn’t mean they lived in the comfort and privilege that the word ‘millionaire’ suggests.

In most cases, the bulk of the value doesn’t derive from a share portfolio, a healthy bank deposit or a string of clever investments – instead, it is almost certainly a family home.

It’s a home they’ve probably worked most of their lives to pay off, maintain and improve. A mortgage is a debt that can take the best part of a lifetime to clear, but even if a homeowner ends up with considerable equity in their house, as the housing crisis pushes values higher and higher, it’s still just a family home.

It’s the place you brought your newborn children home to and where, you hope, they will someday bring children of their own. And yet if you struggled to hold onto it, perhaps even accepting more straitened circumstances in retirement so as to keep it for them, to give them secure accommodation in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis, or help towards purchasing a property of their own, the real beneficiaries of your struggle and sacrifice will be this Government.

And given its track record of responsible expenditure on items such as bike sheds, outsized printers and a multi-billion-euro children’s hospital, that’s like leaving your hard-earned money to the family black sheep with the online shopping addiction, the weakness for three-legged horses, and the taste for Chateau Lafite. So reports that Finance Minister and Tánaiste Simon Harris is considering a significant reduction in inheritance tax, in this year’s Budget, come as a small glimmer of hope for anyone with a property or a family business to bequeath.

At the moment, the most a parent can leave a child before taxes are incurred is €400,000. And that may sound like a lot, but in a market where the average list price of an ordinary three-bed semi-D, nationwide, is €435,000, that’s an easy threshold to reach. And for any value above that, the Revenue will take 33%.

So if, for example, the family home you bought for €30,000 back in the early 1980s is now valued at €1million-plus, and you want to leave it between two children, they’ll have to find at least €50,000 each in order to inherit their family home.

And if you’ve only got one child to inherit the property, they’ll very probably be forced to sell to pay the taxes.

Even if the parents of adult children wanted to downsize now, and give them financial gifts towards a deposit on a home of their own, rather than leaving the family home in their will, they’d be hard-pressed to find a suitable property at a price that’d make economic sense.

At the height of the Celtic Tiger in 2006, a child could inherit almost half-a-million euro from a parent before incurring a much lower Capital Acquisitions Tax of 20%. Now property values are close to their boom-time levels, but the threshold is lower and the tax rate is almost 40% higher.

A return to those 2006 rates would make a huge difference to families who are faced with an onerous financial burden under the current regime, as well as the grief and bereavement of a loved one’s death.

According to a recent survey, our dysfunctional property market means that one in five home owners is a paper millionaire.

There was a time when having ‘millionaire parents’ would have meant never having to work again; now it just means that flawed housing policy has pushed your modest family home into the seven-figure category – and, unless you can afford a hefty tax bill to inherit it, far from enjoying a life of ease, you could easily end up homeless.

Burnt Trump still has Giorgia on his mind

Last year, Donald Trump was all over Italian leader Giorgia Meloni like a rash, telling her she was a ‘beautiful young woman’ and, as the only EU leader invited to his inauguration, she was cast as Europe’s ‘Trump whisperer’. 

Well, that’s gone belly-up, and proves again just how viciously he can turn on a former ally. She criticised him over his attack on the Pope, and also refused to support his war on Iran, and now they’re embroiled in a daft spat over who asked who for a picture at the recent G7 summit. 

He claims Ms Meloni ‘begged him’ to pose for a shot (because we know how Donald hates being pictured with beautiful blonde women) to boost her popularity. She smartly retorted that being his friend hadn’t exactly helped her ratings and, when it came to popularity, ‘I suggest you focus on yours’. 

Some ice for that burn, Donald? 

Tasteless advert is a croc of... 

RYANAIR has flown close to the wind with some of its promotional campaigns over the years, including using some salacious gossip about Prince William in a cheeky advert a couple of years ago.

But even Michael O’Leary would have drawn the line at joking about that incident in England last week where a three-year-old was thrown into a crocodile pit at a zoo.

The suspect, said to have special needs, was with a group on a day out with carers, and weekend reports suggest they were scrolling on their phones when the incident occurred.

It seems a crocodile reached the child before handlers could rescue him, and he suffered serious injuries. A bit soon, then, for a jokey ad from a voucher firm saying, ‘Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid’. 

There is such a thing as bad publicity, after all.

Gen Z’s ding-dong battle 

It was a relief to see that survey over the weekend, which found Gen Z visitors don’t like ringing doorbells and prefer to text when they’re outside.

I thought it was just my own children’s young adult friends who do that. I’ve got a doorbell camera so it’s disconcerting to get a message saying there’s a person at the door, and then watch them stand there, staring at their phone, making no effort to ring a bell – especially when they all look very ‘Paranormal Activity’ after dark on those cameras anyway.

Almost half said they don’t like ringing the doorbell because it feels ‘intrusive’. Then again, this is the generation who avoid punctuating their texts because full stops feel abrupt and commas are practically abusive. 

It’s a doorbell, folks, not a battering ram – give it a whirl.