The latest sample of ideas received since the campaign’s launch
Agriculture and food
A huge investment in the forestry sector could provide thousands of jobs all over the country, in particular the western half of the country.
Ireland has the most ideal conditions for growing trees in all of Europe, better than those of Norway and Sweden; both countries have big forestry industries which represent a large proportion of their national export income.
Great Britain is the main buyer of timber from Scandinavia - our next door neighbours! An advanced timber industry in Eire would be home grown, renewable, and good for the environment, and it is not an industry that will be shipped to a cheaper economy when costs rise. I believe it’s a win win!
Agriculture and food
If the supermarkets added a little bit of extra flair to the display of Irish produced foods and products to make it easier to find, then at least when we are doing our shopping we know we are supporting our own economy, keeping jobs in this country.
Hold local food fairs to give local business an opportunity to display their excellent wares. We have modern home exhibitions, why not modern food exhibitions?
Agriculture and food
Regenerate our mountain woodlands: Remove sheep off our uplands and plant hardwoods up to 1,500-feet level, reversing the destruction of our forests in the 1600s.
Compensate farmers appropriately, by for instance paying them to manage the woodland and allowing them any revenue accruing from forest management. The advantages of this idea are:
- Creation of a vast carbon sink
- Replication of the lush mountain woodland such as existed in the middle ages
- Increased wildlife and biodiversity
- Fantastic tourist attraction
- Labour-intensive and low capital outlay (lots of jobs)
Agriculture and food
Over the last couple of years I have noticed imported bags of firewood logs being sold in retail outlets across the country. We have an abundance of commercial state forests in the country.
The market for timber going into construction has dramatically slumped - a new market for forest output is needed.
I believe that an initiative that would facilitate enterprising persons harvesting timber, cutting it up as firewood and selling into the Irish and export markets could provide sustainable employment at low cost.
There is also the advantage that this is a renewable, carbon neutral fuel resource. As an incentive the trees that would be used for this enterprise could be provided by Coillte at very low rates.
As an aside, people who traditionally cut turf could be enticed away from this environmentally sensitive practice by offering them the opportunity to harvest firewood instead.
All island economy
I am suggesting that people who can afford to do so should donate an interest-free loan to the state for say a period of three years.
I am convinced that there is a vast amount of unproductive wealth in Ireland shared by tens of thousands of our people. Most are high earners and many comfortably retired. I am of the view that large numbers of such people would respond to an appeal.
I am now in septuagenarian years and I am lucky to have my health to be able to continue working in my profession as a solicitor.
I am far from being wealthy but I am willing to give an interest free loan of €100,000 to my country at this time of great need for a period of three years. The amount would be repaid to me or to my estate thereafter.
If 5,000 people were to contribute a similar sum, it would total half a billion euro!
Construction
Improve the flow of information about the housing market by making it a legal requirement for immediate disclosure of property selling prices to an online website - thereby accelerating the process of market adjustment so that recovery is swifter.
Culture
Generate a science culture for Ireland. 60% of GDP is based on science in Ireland (even agriculture accounts for only 6% GDP). But do the Irish think of themselves as a nation of scientists?
The rate of progress is accelerating. No one can truly imagine where we will be by the end of the century but one thing we all must agree on is that technology and therefore scientific innovation will be the key to the future. We need to embrace science.
I feel that is the single most essential factor in our success. We can fascinate young minds, and this is the true key to the future.
If our young people embrace science, rational thinking, and all that it brings they will be armed with all the skills they need to develop the smart economy that is our future, and astronomy is the way to entice them due to the innate curiosity that every human has for how they got here, how the universe was created and what does it all mean.
To date young people in our organisation have gone on to work for NASA, become students of Stephen Hawking, and find work in the smart economy.
But their parents, friends and families do not always appreciate how important an interest in science is.
One day a child expressing an interest in a science degree will be heralded with the same glee that greeted the announcement that a son wanted to become a priest in the Ireland of old.
Social and voluntary
My idea comes from a youth work background. I see the changes that are occurring but believe that youth cafes are 10 years too late.
I believe that if every community got together, that they could utilise the people in the community, the carpenters, electrician, plumbers etc and the business minded people.
If the community came together, took a derelict house, built it up using people from the area that a new type of youth service could be achieved.
It would offer a safe space for all young people and provide many things a café does but also could be used as an intervention service.
Young people are the taxpayers of the future; help them now so they can feed the economy of the future.
Education
Schools regularly spend scarce funding ‘buying in’ teaching staff for exam invigilation while teachers already being paid to work in the school are free.
Why not set up an invigilator exchange system where schools relatively close to one another would provide invigilators from their own staff to each other free of charge - thereby saving both schools additional costs.
Education
The recession is going to make it difficult for many graduates to find employment. This idea uses a combination of education and work experience to provide options for graduates.
It requires cooperation between Enterprise Ireland and third-level institutions. A third-level institution would take a group of 10 graduates on a sector specific one-year (Sep-Aug) graduate diploma.
The programme could include six hours per week online lectures plus industry-based applied project work, possibly three 10-credit modules and 30 credits of work-based projects.
The college allocates the graduates to company projects (preferably based within the company). If the company gets a €5,000 grant (e.g. Innovation Voucher) from Enterprise Ireland and adds €3,500, the postgraduate student could be paid a tax-free sum of €400 per month for 12 months, leaving €3,700 to cover fees.
This would roughly cover fees for a minimum group of 10 people, based on 11 lecturer hours/week (six hours lectures and five hours project supervision).
The graduate gets valuable experience, some compensation to offset their living costs and a valuable qualification.
The company gets a valuable resource that costs them around €70 per week to work on an innovative project or projects; the government saves over half (net of the grant) of the cost of unemployment assistance for each postgraduate for a year.
Further employment for lecturers is created, and this also improves competitiveness of the companies, and improves the performance of graduates as future taxpayers and productive members of society.
Education
All children’s allowance entitlements should be linked to an educational parenting programme for both parents of the child. The course would be an annual event, maybe four or five sessions covering the basics of child care and parenting linked to the child’s age.
A certificate of completion would be given to the parents that would then give them the entitlement to draw their children’s allowance.
In my opinion this would have multiple benefits. It would reach parents and infants at the earliest possible opportunity, giving guidance to new parents throughout the child’s early development in an era of increasing family isolation.
These classes would enable new parents to meet others in similar situations, reducing isolation and spreading good parenting skills. The course is optional so those that do not require payment will not attend, thus saving money - the money saved is then used to finance the course.
It may turn out that the scheme would be self financing. But above all young/first time parents are supported by the state both financially and socially.
Education
Idea in brief: an edutainment camp.
The need: I am mother of two teenagers and it scares me to know that the summer is around the corner. I need to make a decision between having extremely bored kids at home and spending large amounts of money to keep them occupied.
Who and what: the trainers are talented adults (up to any age) who are sitting at home for they are not ready for a 9-5 job or may not have gotten a job for various reasons.
It is a good chance for them to make some money while sharing their knowledge. Children can learn a diverse set of skills from gardening to painting, computer skills to writing skills, newspaper editing to cooking, running a crèche to drama and learning music, housekeeping to training.
The options for learning are unlimited and all this will be under supervised experienced adults.
Where: schools/colleges should be ready to give their premises at much subsidised rates as they are not being used at this time, with a promise that these will be returned to them in good condition.
Companies can sponsor talents, materials (recycled) and resources depending on what they can give. The camp can in turn be used as an outsource unit for general day-to-day jobs like photocopying, data entry and more.
Additionally, sections of the camp can be sponsored - e.g. the newspaper editing can be sponsored say by a news agency, cooking by a hotel, and computer courses by an IT company.
All activities of the camp need not be skill building - some could be leisure activity too.
Education
In many ways, our society is shaped by how we raise our children. Families are less connected now, and the skills needed to care for and raise young children are more often passed on through organisations - medical and social services, publishing and the media, etc rather than being passed from the older generation to the younger.
Why is it that we are legally required to train before driving a vehicle, that we are required to attend school so that we can read, write and do sums, but nobody makes us learn how to take good care of our children?
So my idea is: teach basic child-rearing skills to teenagers while they’re still in school. It would be cheap, will help make them feel more responsible, and will have a fundamental effect on our society.
Some of those teenagers might well be starting then anyway, and they’ll need all the help they can get.
Education
Return to having ‘tech’ secondary schools where skills that are hands on are taught. Trades such as plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work, could again be learnt in the early teens.
Doing the Leaving Certificate is not for everyone and does not recognise the different skills and ways of learning that people have.
Education
We are short of school classrooms yet we underutilise the classrooms we have. A typical classroom in a primary school is used from 9am until 3pm or 2pm for the junior classes. They are closed for three months of the year.
Rather than building more classrooms with the consequent huge embodied energy and carbon emissions associated, we should operate a shift system that starts classes in staggered cycles starting at 8am and finishing at 6pm.
This will allow us to get at least 30% more use out of the same building stock. This way we can upgrade our schools to quality low energy buildings.
Currently the department of education demands that schools be built to a very cheap specification €1,200 per sq metre. This requires a very basic specification which allows no room for improving energy efficiency above the building regulations standards.
We end up with cavernous sheds with little quality. This does not allow schools to include renewable energy systems.
By making better use of new stock we build we can build more energy efficient and better and more beautiful schools with better facilities. Flexible hours can also be organised to suit parents.
There is no reason why that all classes should start and end at the same time.
Green business
Recycled glass products for kitchen and dining use. I propose that in each major population centre such a facility be set up to make glass tumblers, jugs etc from recycled glass.
Glass blowers, now redundant from Waterford Glass, could assist and possibly staff these operations. Designers might be asked (at a fraction of the normal fee or for a very modest per item royalty) to think of simple kitchenware designs that are also beautiful and hardwearing.
The raw material is free, or virtually!
Green business
Oil rigs off our coast (like in Mayo) could be used to generate electricity and also produce a by-product: sea salt.
Rather than burning off the surplus gas, it could be used to heat huge boilers of sea water, producing steam that would drive turbines on land to create electricity for the surrounding areas and any surplus could be put back in to the national grid.
A proper distillery put in place could catch the leftover sea salt.
Manufacturing
Conduct research on the companies that have left Ireland in recent years to relocate to low-cost economies and find out how successful their relocation has been.
I have heard of companies that have regretted their decision to leave Ireland due to quality issues, language barriers and cultural differences.
During this downturn and deflations, if Ireland can regain its national competitiveness in terms of costs and wage bills, these industries may return.
Policy
Many small firms have cashflow problems. Many large organisations have positive cashflows.
Currently we meet creditor’s bills within the 30-day window, which is the norm - even though this is not met by some businesses.
Our organisation is willing to reduce the 30 days to 20 days and hence to pay suppliers within 20 days, helping the cashflow of the many smaller businesses we deal with. All larger organisations should agree to move to 20 days.
Policy
Introduce a structured support and encouragement of telecommuting and home-based working.
Ireland lags behind the developed world in this regard. Any incidence of working in this manner has arisen from the initiative of individual companies and self-employed people.
The advantages include green issues (take cars off the road at peak times/reduce public transport demands), financial (lower operating costs for companies in terms of office space), social, and many others.
In Ireland at present, not only is there no such framework, but there are distinct barriers to the process.
Most particularly, setting aside a dedicated working space in the home can lead to complications such as planning permission (partial change of use of premises), Capital Gains Tax if the house is sold, and other tax aspects.
With the availability of reliable internet and communications infrastructure, the disadvantages of remote working have been greatly reduced.
Finally, the cost to the Government of such an initiative would be modest. It should include advisory services for companies and individuals, tax incentives rather than impediments, and simplified regulations.
Retail
What do we do with all those empty retail units? This idea is based around the principal streets in our cities and towns, the streets that tourists are more than likely to walk up and down.
If we take the example of Dublin’s Grafton Street, there is a proliferation of ‘To Let’ signs at present which is not enhancing the image of the street and readily gives a visitor a quick snapshot of the economy.
Many of these stores are unlikely to be leased in the short to medium term and we would propose persuading the landlord to let them on a short-term or “until let” basis (for free or a nominal rent) to the very best in Irish design, arts and crafts.
There are many of great Irish designers who would not ordinarily be able to afford such a prime location and may in time be able to take on the lease properly. We would be showcasing the best of Ireland abroad at a time when our international image may not be all that positive.
In the meantime the landlord can continue to try and let his/her store through their agent. A special “To Let” sign could be developed acknowledging that the landlord is partaking in this initiative while his/her property is to let.
Retail
The countryside is littered with empty beer cans. Impose a 50 cent levy on all beers sold in cans and purchased in supermarkets and off -licences.
Retail
I am a mechanical engineer and I am totally baffled by refrigeration practices in large grocery stores.
Refrigeration is installed to preserve the condition of products, yet when one visits a supermarket the ambient temperature in the dairy produce and meat areas is often uncomfortably low.
This means that heavy cold air, intended to refrigerate the produce in open-fronted cabinets, is spilling out into the aisles and chilling the surroundings, usually in conflict with a heating system intended to achieve precisely the opposite!
Refrigeration is a very energy-intensive and expensive process, yet a large amount of this energy is simply wasted in these applications. The universal answer from refrigeration suppliers is that they act on clients’ instructions and, for marketing reasons, insist that there should be no physical barrier between the customer and the product.
I really believe that there is a case here for a plastic bag type initiative which would apply some form of financial penalty to store operators for the use of open-fronted refrigerated display cabinets unless they (the cabinets) can be demonstrated to contain all the cold air.
If all outlets were forced to enclose their refrigerated product displays then there would be no relative “marketing” advantage accruing to anyone of them.
Technology
I would like to see some sort of a black box being developed and installed by Irish companies in all cars to monitor cars speed and to prevent accidents.
If a garda stops a car they could by law ask the motorist to pop his bonnet and they could plug into the black box and read data about the cars’ speed for a set period of months and if any irregular speeds popped up they would have to explain why they were going at that speed.
If successful this could be a worldwide product with it being developed and manufactured in Ireland.
* (This idea is very long and detailed and has had to be edited for space reasons).
Tourism
O’Connell Street has already received the first facelift with the addition of the paving, friendly wide footpaths and the Spire. Henry Street also has been upgraded and looks well.
We now need to move to the second face lift stage. At the minute O’Connell Street, the backbone of Dublin has to offer fast food chains.
My proposal is simple: both sides of O’Connell Street should be utilised more efficiently to attract tourism. The street should be zoned for special commercial use to target tourism.
The fast food outlets should be confined to the side streets only.
Introduce restaurants, cafes, Irish bakeries and confectionary specialists, farmer’s market outlets. Cafes and restaurants could be themed on many of our famous writers.
Walls and ceilings could be covered with their many famous quotes and literature. Names like ‘the James Joyce cafe’ ‘Ulysses’ restaurant etc.
The ground floor windows and doors should be draped with large green canopies which run the full length of O’Connell Street on both sides, offering the tourist an outside dining/smoking area. The restaurants should vary to suit tourists looking for a reasonable meal through to the most expensive seafood type restaurants.
O’Connell Street should become a free internet zone, where the passer-by tourist could sit down inside or outside sipping a coffee while browsing online.
The central median should be used to sell flowers similar to what we already have on Grafton Street. Let’s bring colour and life to O’Connell Street, above all let’s make it much more appealing to tourists.
Tourism
My idea relates to activity based tourism. The model for my idea has been repeated successfully a number of times in England. It is called “Centerparks Forest-Based Holiday Villages”.
One of these parks would be very successful within short commuting distance of Dublin. “Centerparks” is a self-sustaining holiday village - you park your car and you spend a week or two in the village on foot or bicycle.
Every outdoor and indoor activity based pursuits imaginable is there for all ages together with restaurants with good kids’ playing areas and also night-life venues.
If we had this type of facility in Ireland we would not have to go to England for it. Tourism in Ireland does not cater very well for family holidays. Outdoor activity based pursuits are too fragmented.
A lot more needs to be done. Imagine the number of jobs this sort of village would create, not to mention the enjoyment it would bring to many families.
This idea works but need a large investment to make it work. Profits made from activity-based holiday attractions should be tax free to encourage investment.
Tourism
Place remote web cameras at tourist spots and beaches around the country. Give people the added incentive to holiday in Ireland by tracking where the sun is shining or where the queues are the shortest.
Web camera feed should be accessible from key tourist websites such as Failte Ireland website and should be free for businesses in that area to use.
This has lots of specialty uses from surfers seeing the best waves, wind surfers seeing where wind is blowing, swimmers checking that the tide is in, sun seekers seeing if its sunny in Brittas Bay when it’s not in Dublin, mountain bikers seeing conditions in Wicklow hills, mountain walkers checking visibility on hills and tourists seeing how long queues are for popular resorts and picnickers seeing how crowded the Phoenix Park is.
Transport
As a reasonably frequent user of the N11 and other major arterial roads, may I propose that the service stations to include refreshment, fuel, toilets and picnic areas are immediately put out to tender on all motorway and trunk roads where there are currently only the most basic of lay-bys.
Not only will it immediately stimulate jobs in construction and for those working in those areas but it will also be non competitive.
In my experience many people on long journeys do not come off the major roads to use facilities in villages but rather wait until they reach their destination.
The service stations should be completely funded by private enterprise and licensed out to operators. In most other European countries these facilities already exist.
Transport
The use of the canals instead of road transport to get Dublin’s rubbish to the incinerator.
Transport
Public transport should be more frequent and reliable to colleges, particularly colleges like DCU. Students travelling from Drogheda/Balbriggan need to be sure that they can rely on the bus service to get them to the college. A better service to/from the airport should also be looked at.
Instead of cutting bus services to / from Dublin / Swords / Balbriggan / Balrothery / Skerries, single-decker buses or minibuses should be used so that commuters have a frequent service that they can rely on.
A Dublin Bus employee in Dublin can cancel or change a bus route in north county Dublin - which mean that there are gaps in the service for hours - and they seem unaware the chaos they have caused to commuters left stranded.
For local routes a fare of e.g. €1 across the board could be implemented.
Transport
There is a cost to annually upkeep designated jetties, signage and service areas of water-based activities. Semi state and local authorities provide a service which accommodates upkeep of facilities on our marine and fresh waterways.
Last year for example on Lough Mask, the fisheries board reported a boat count during the month of May of well over 1,000 boats on its lake. They are used for pleasure and pastime and are availing of a facility.
Lough Mask itself costs the Exchequer much money to maintain its trout stocks, slipways, jetties, moorings, car parks, bin services and picnic location upkeep etc.
My proposal is to licence / tax all boat users on our waterways a small sum annually to help maintain the service provided by the state organisations. Not to mention it would help facilitate a register of boats which could assist in preventing the spread of invasive species to our precious waterways.
We have a valuable resource that is being utilised by the public; let us begin to earn enough back to maintain the resource for all users.
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