Summary of ideas submitted in the Other category…

• During the duration of the financial emergency, link the good ideas coming out of this initiative to the media, by feeding them with positive ideas from this site. Instead of nightly job losses on RTÉ, let’s have some positive news.
• During World War II, Ireland operated a system called ‘double summer time’. This means that the clocks went forward two hours instead of one at the end of March. It was an excellent way of saving energy and should be looked at again.
• Each department or separate operating entity within the public services - government, hospitals, universities - should have separate electricity meters and be responsible for and pay for their own electricity consumption out of their operating budgets.
• Each government department should set up its own selling unit. The selling could consist of potential sales of unused fixed or non-fixed assets, services, or anything that is saleable.
• Each month the Revenue draw out two PPS numbers at random, and give each person drawn a tax-free sum of €1,000,000. This will cost the exchequer €24,000,000 per annum, but will encourage people to pay their taxes.
• Early Childcare Supplement should be abolished.
• Economic War Bond 5% and 6% tax exempt for maturity in seven and 10 years respectively. If 250,000 people invested an average of €10,000 each that would raise €5 billion. These funds would be guaranteed by the Government but ring-fenced exclusively for investment in new and developing business.
• Educate service and manufacturing decision-makers on how to forward plan while meeting the changing demand with sharing the risk with the supplier or buyer.
• Educational bodies should consider “subjects” such as how to design and upload your own website, how to use technology to promote/market your new end product and protection of your idea.
• Eight artists, sculptors, photographers/painters to form a group and set up their own art gallery, art school. Each artist in the group takes 100% on their work, invited artists will pay 20% on each sale to the gallery, and the gallery will be part-time staffed, with the group taking alternative weeks.
• Eliminate all bonuses for bankers.
• Eliminate DIRT on savings.
• Eliminate most councils in the country and have one overarching regional council for each of the four provinces.
• Emerging farmer groups to grow biomass crops to create energy.
• Employ corporation and council workers productively to address leaking water.
• Employ management consultants to assist with a public service productivity plan to bring the public service standards of productivity and efficiency up to world best-practice levels within five years.
• Employ more people in the Department of Social Welfare to deal with the increasing claims, which would help to increase short-term employment at least.
• Employ staff to monitor and protect facilities put in place during the ‘boom times’, while at the same time providing employment.
• Employment grants should be made available to companies that create new jobs and take someone off the dole. At least 50% of the salary for the first year should be grant aided, with the company having to account for the return on investment of the new employee.
• Enable businesses in Ireland and other countries to promote themselves in the many foreign languages. Create an international network of cities, enabling a rapid roll-out of an online service to invite all local businesses and other organisations to register their contact details and additional info. It will generate a global “Yellow Pages”, set up like a search engine for dozens of languages, creating one of the biggest global databases on the Internet.
• Enable easy investment in Irish businesses by people, through their pensions. These investments could have a set return or early buy-back bonuses for the investor. To qualify a business would need tax clearance and a good history with the CRO.
• Encourage all SME businesses to pay small amounts to their creditors as and when they can.
• Encourage and support small-scale forestry.
• Encourage businesses to look at themselves as bundles of exchangeable services. For instance, the company I work for is short of storage space but we don’t have the cash flow to rent storage - we are a training organisation but we also have underemployed people in other functional departments. Rather than letting those people go we could offer their services in exchange for services or a certificate of ‘units of work performed’ that we could exchange for storage space.
• Encourage couples whose children are finished school to move away from the school area by granting 50% off the stamp duty of the new house they move to.
• Encourage energy-efficient homes.
• Encourage foreign nationals to invite their friends to visit.
• Encourage healers to cure the sick.
• Encourage hotels/B&Bs etc to source ingredients locally (funded by redirecting subventions paid to farmers, and repositioning tax breaks given to hotels).
• Encourage Irish to rent holiday homes in Ireland before moving abroad.
• Encourage local professional who have lost jobs to work for a smaller wage than they used to, but in the local area and on projects that are public-private partnerships.
• Encourage people on the dole to do an educational course / training.
• Encourage people to buy goods in their local community and to buy Irish, helping to contribute to VAT collection by the Government.
• Encourage people to take responsibility for their own health by education.
• Encourage those with off-shore accounts to come forward and declare their savings by having another amnesty on their accounts.