Summary of ideas submitted in the Other category…

• Jury members should be asked to pay for their own lunches as they would be paying for their own lunches anyway if they were in attendance at work.
• Land currently held as security for loans that are now in arrears should be transferred to national development company.
• Launch a scheme to provide six months’ to one year’s moratorium on current mortgage repayments through banks (or six months’ interest-only mortgage payments).
• Leave the euro and re-establish the punt.
• LED based street lights present a much more efficient and cost effective solution which would not only save the public money in the long run but will also pay for the roll-out across the country.
• Legalise existing casinos and tax poker tournaments.
• Let the Gardai enforce the law regarding fog lights. Issue “on the spot” fines to every driver illegally using their fog lights.
• Let us work towards food and energy security on our island. Let us use every scrap of arable land to grow food in a sustainable and common sense way. This will be labour intensive, and every citizen would have the right to participate in this work in some way at different times in their lives
• Let’s bring out a new newspaper with only positive news like your website.
• Let’s make more use of the natural resource we have. Catch fish at home, process fish in the towns, sell and make money move around.
• Leveraging Anglo Irish Bank: We could allow people to move their mortgage to Anglo Irish and change their mortgage to a 60-year one at a very low interest rate. This would mean their monthly payments are much lower allowing them to take lower paid jobs without worry.
• Link up Luas lines.
• Local authorities should be empowered to levy private houses that have chosen to externalise rainfall by wholly paving their complete front areas.
• Local authorities should have tax raising powers (either through a set percentage of income tax, property tax, service charges or a combination) and the accompanying duty to deliver a wider range of services than at present including primary healthcare, primary and secondary education and policing.
• Local people should volunteer in schools to free up resources.
• Look at measures to regain ownership of the network and reclaim the line rental fees (or a significant portion of the fees) to pay for investment in countrywide fibre-optic networks.
• Lotto money be diverted to health as the sports facilities in the country are well taken care of and the health service is being cut back in many areas.
• Lower the VAT rate to a flat 7% which is not reclaimable by business entities. In essence this transforms VAT into a sales tax across the board with no exemptions or reclaims.
• Make another website, along the lines of this one, seeking money-saving ideas for the public sector.
• Make Ireland a centre for excellence in Universal Design; build it into our thinking and hot-house our capabilities.
• Make it absolutely tax free to film here. If even one big budget film comes here a year, the knock on effects for catering, taxis, extras, tourism, local business etc is huge.
• Make it easy to start up small companies - Revenue should create a computer programme/software that an individual employing, say, three people can log on and click boxes in relation to tax, PRSI, expenses.
• Make it much easier for businesses to get off the ground by cutting through layers of paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy.
• Make low category prisoners or people arrested on public order offences complete a set amount of time of community service i.e. cleaning up our towns and villages.
• Make sure each county council takes responsibility for clearing up the verges of the little country roads.
• Make the national parliament operate as such, not a collection of TDs protecting just their own constituency at the expense of national progress. We need to redraw election boundaries not by location but by age.
• Make this county self-sufficient in energy within seven years. This will improve the balance of payments by €2 billion annually and generate a vast number of jobs and create a big export industry as an after-effect.
• Make this website a permanent feature.
• Mandatory pension for the people funded by the people with the aim of achieving a more stable pension for the people of Ireland and Europe.
• Many nurses in this country are self-educated to Masters level in their specific area of interest. Why do we not use these nurses as consultant nurses? It would be a cheaper way of managing healthcare, the specialist nurses could refer people to the GP if they feel it is necessary.
• Many of our towns are culturally “twinned” to similar towns abroad. This cultural link costs each town many of thousands of euro every year with many benefits. Why not build on these links? Towns could now “twin” with other towns or communities in poorer parts of the world and donate community raised funds to the likes of Concern or Trocaire, who are already working in these areas.
• Many of the employees of SR Technics who availed of the redundancy packages set up small companies managing aircraft maintenance and supply of parts for engines etc. Government to form a co-op of these companies and house them in a single area within the current SRT facility. They could all avail of the others’ expertise and assist to grow the businesses in different areas.
• Many people have “a few bob” in relatively small bank accounts. Not large enough to make a big investment in a business or idea on their own but together could be a good start-up fund or boost funding to businesses.
• Many supplies and services under the procurement regime may be the subject of framework agreements put in place a year or more ago, when prices generally were higher than they are now. With careful management or encouragement all non-binding agreements to supply could be re-tendered with the emphasis placed on breaking needs down into lots that SMEs can more comfortably bid for.
• Many USA-born Irish citizens are anxious to live in Ireland but face various issues as their spouses cannot also obtain citizenship. Once a foreign-born citizen is admitted to the foreign birth registry, their spouses should be able to obtain citizenship within two to three years.