It is no doubt nothing more than a coincidence that the end of June exchequer surplus is within £30 million of the £2.9 billion that the state raised from the sale of Eircom (nee Telecom Eireann) a year ago next Friday. But with the 500,000 small investors who took part in the biggest ever sale of a State asset looking at a combined loss of more than £550 million on their investment, the use of the surplus to make a compensation payment of some sort might go down well with the electorate.
Such a course of action is not being contemplated and the surplus - which works out at just over £800 for every man, woman and child - is instead to be spent on paying down some of the national debt and funding the national pension scheme established last month.
Worthy as they may be, neither proposal is likely to be greeted with much enthusiasm by the public. Much more welcome would be a new motorway from Dublin to Cork or other more imaginative proposals.
It costs £5 million to build a kilometre of motorway according to the the National Roads Authority. On this basis, £2.9 billion would buy you 586 kilometre of new tarmac which would easily cover the 254 kilometres from Dublin to Cork and the 216 kilometres to Galway with plenty of blacktop to spare for bypasses.
Other populist measures could include a swathe of new hospitals to tackle the waiting list problem. On the basis that the Tallaght Hospital cost around £140 million by the time it was completed in 1998, the Government now has the scope for an additional 20 high-tech hospitals.
Alternatively, it could build fewer hospitals and put aside some of the money to meet the £60 million a year cost of running hospitals like Tallaght. The housing crisis is another obvious target for the Exchequer`s surplus cash, which would allow them to buy around 1,160 houses in Ballsbridge of the type being sold by Mr Justice Hugh O'Flaherty on Herbert Park. The seven-bedroomed house could easily house a family or two of refugees.
Building more local authority housing is another possibility. In May, the Minister for State at the Department of the Environment, Mr Bobby Molloy, announced that local authorities planned to build 5,500 houses this year at a cost of £310 million. On those figures, the budget surplus could be turned into 51,000 council houses without too much trouble A more likely use of the surplus and one which will be welcomed by the public is tax cuts. The Tanaiste, Ms Harney, has already indicated that she wants to cut another two percentage points off the lower rate of tax in the next budget.
Cutting one percentage point off both the higher and lower tax rates would only cost £150 million so the scope for larger cuts is clearly there and a repeat of last year's £942 million package of income tax cuts is on the cards.
Another obvious target for increased spending is childcare. The £40 million a year the Government has committed to upgrading facilities and subsidising the salaries of childcare worker looks a little on the mean side when compared to a surplus of almost £3 billion.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions believes that £400 million is needed to provide the sort of creche facilities that would seriously address the labour shortage. Another £400 million is needed to bring those dependent on social welfare up to the European poverty line level of income, says ICTU.
If the Government is feeling a little more brave, it could consider investing for the nation's future in something more exciting than the new national fund. It has missed out on a third generation mobile phone licence in the UK, which were recently sold for an average of £2.5 billion sterling, but it could use the money to buy a small stake for the nation in GE, the giant US industrial and financial service conglomerate, currently worth $514 billion.
