Summary of ideas submitted in the Other category…

• Encourage use of community halls.
• Encourage/incentivise more nurses to upskill as practitioners - or even introduce it as part of nursing curricula in universities.
• Energy costs could be reduced to domestic consumers by simply eliminating the standing charge and spreading this cost across the kilowatt unit price. An annual allowance of say 1400kwh for electricity could be provided at the current unit rate. This would meet an average household’s very basic needs. If households stayed within this allowance the elimination of the standing charge could mean as much as a 30% reduction in bills.
• Engage in economic gardening.
• Ensure constant improvement in all state services at no extra cost, with improved efficiencies and better management oversight, through the application of a simple ‘common sense rule’. This would allow anybody paid out of the public purse to query any instruction, standing order or policy on the basis of contravening common sense.
• Ensure that all investment in R&D by our country has a commercial innovation platform.
• Ensure that lunch allowance of public sector is accompanied with a receipt.
• ESB should increase its current night rate hours to help people spread the cost of their energy bills. Bord Gais should introduce night rate hours.
• Establish a brand for Irish seaweed wonder-food and promote it strongly internationally. The market can be grown greatly and made into a long-term earner for coastal communities.
• Establish a creative industries version of the IFSC.
• Establish a financial corporation that is licenced to generate its own “superior umbrella currency”.
• Establish a new Irish bank: ‘People’s Bank’. The credit unions would be the closest local example, however with central leadership, a broader range of products and shared.
• Establish an ‘enterprise facilitator’ in each town around the country. The simple objective is the creation of sustainable jobs/enterprise, using the ideas and talent of local people, without the ‘hassle’ of the existing enterprise support schemes.
• Establish idea management systems in organisations
• Euro-a-Year - people with a flair for entrepreneurship might be recruited both within Ireland and outside to help change new ideas into new businesses similar to Dollar-a-Year in US.
• Every household to receive €10,000 from the Government and spend it as follows: €5,000 to go straight to pay a lump sum off a household, car or other loan with the local bank, €5,000 to be spent in Ireland to Irish companies on products that are needed.
• Every person from birth to death should now have a pendant-hung USB chip, on which is stored and updated PPS number, head and shoulder jpg, birth date, vaccinations, allergies, blood group, organ donor status, all tests and scans, all prescriptions.
• Every town in Ireland with population of over 8,000 should have a local biogas supply initiative in place.
• Everybody give an undertaking no strike action be taken. Accept a three-year pay freeze. And commit to at least a 5% increase in productivity throughout every sector.
• Everybody who has any money on deposit with any of the commercial banks or building societies should withdraw it and deposit it with Anglo Irish.
• Everybody who is in receipt of social welfare and who is of able mind and body should have to spend three or four days a week working.
• Everyone wants a better future and I believe that there is room for us all to give to government by Lotto means.
• Everyone who appears in the courts convicted of a driving offence should - as part of their punishment - be made to attend a special driver safety course and charged to do so, with 50% of monies raised going back into the community to fund a road safety programme.
• Exclude interest paid in connection with investment in rental property by not giving the relief to taxpayers who claim it.
• Exempt employers and employees from PRSI and levies payments for one year in relation to any new recruits taken on who have been unemployed for more than six months.
• Expand BES schemes for SMEs, particularly ones that are exporting.
• Expand Enterprise Ireland’s voluntary early retirement scheme to the rest of the reduced PRSI non-commercial public sector e.g. Forfás, FÁS, civil service; 5;000 workers will cost €50,000 each which works out at €1 billion over four years. Under the scheme each worker on average would get a year’s salary and a pension of 30% of salary which works out at 5000 x 50000 + 5000 x 15000 x 4 = €550 million.
• Expand the concept of the Ideas Campaign to all sectors of the workforce. It can only serve to improve efficiency and productivity.
• Expand this campaign to seek ideas from HSE staff on how to reduce inefficiencies (sensible, simple ideas, not ones that cost money to implement).
• Explore flexible working arrangements such as everyone losing one day of work rather than some losing their jobs.
• Fáilte Ireland should run a competition for 1,000 free flights to Ireland from US and& Canada and something similar in Europe.
• Faltering construction industry and their unemployed workers, with their building experience, can be re-employed in the historical and architectural restoration of sites and crumbling buildings.
• Fast food or “sugar” tax on confectionary and heavily processed/unhealthy food.
• Fidelity Bonding should be a statutory requirement for banks
• Fill bin bags that aren’t full with street litter before being collected.