Anti-recession ideas: rebuild Titanic, sell Shannon and move our prisons overseas

The Your Country, Your Call initiative has invited the public to make suggestions that could help get the country back on its feet. But there are few 'game-changing' ideas among the 1,900 proposals so far, writes ALISON HEALY

MOVE OUR PRISONS overseas. Create a giant theme park in the midlands. Sell Irish citizenship to raise funds for schools. Build another Titanic. These are just a few of the proposals made to the “Your Country, Your Call” campaign.

The brainchild of President McAleese’s husband, Dr Martin McAleese, the campaign is offering two winners a cash prize of €100,000 each and a development fund of up to €500,000 for each project.

When President McAleese launched the online competition, she called for “game-changing” ideas that would help secure prosperity and jobs for Ireland. The yourcountryyourcall.com website had attracted more than 1,900 proposals at the time of going to press, but the judging panel will have to sift through many proposals before encountering the sort of ground-breaking ideas President McAleese was hoping for.

Some suggestions are predictable – set up talent banks, provide small business start-up funds and make unemployed people work for their benefits. Others are more thoughtful. One suggests the creation of a type of swipe card for pensioners for all services, which would remove the need to use cash and cut down on the risk of burglary.

Another entrant boldly suggests stealing the UK’s computer games industry by making developers of computer games eligible for the artists’ tax exemption. “. . . and watch the servers arrive on the ferry a few weeks later,” he predicts.

One hopeful entrant suggests building a tunnel linking Ireland to England with imports to Ireland paying a toll and exports travelling without charge. In the same vein, another suggests a connection between Dublin city and London city by train. In response to the idea, a comment suggests cutting out the middle-man and going from Rosslare to Cherbourg. “If we start the Rossbourg Tunnel now, it should be open by 2050,” he says optimistically.

Some ideas are firmly in the realm of the bizarre. One suggests paying an eastern European state to build prisons and house our prisoners. The prospect of construction work would encourage some eastern Europeans to return home, thus freeing up jobs here, and prisoners would not be able to intimidate the “stricter ex-military prison service”.

Another suggests that Ireland becomes the 51st state of America. “We give Shannon (for example) to the Americans. Let them build their first European military base. Our national debt is pennies relative to the sums of money they deal with in America, so they would clear our national debt.” The contributor accepts that the idea has a minor drawback. “Obviously the downside is that any American base becomes a target for terrorists, and we would have to surrender our neutrality.”

Another suggests selling Irish citizenship to raise funds for schools. It says the citizenship should cost €5 million and be limited to 200 people over a two-year period.

While it’s not clear if some entrants are serious about their ideas, others seem to have their tongues lodged firmly in their cheeks. One suggests gathering all the cattle manure in the country and getting the nation’s artists to sculpt it into giant statues resembling those on Easter Island. “We can then transform Ireland into Europe’s ‘Easter Island hub’ and attract tourists who would normally travel to the real Easter Island and have them spend their money in Ireland instead,” the proposer says.

For a brief period, blogger Hugh Green had some fun with his suggestion of mandatory clown suits for social welfare recipients. Resentment towards welfare recipients would diminish since everyone loved looking at clowns, he suggested. Benefit recipients would feel happier knowing that they were cheering up others, and tourism would receive a major boost with happy clowns on every corner. “Great idea, I love it,” commented someone with the suspicious user name of “Brian Cowen”. However, not everyone enjoyed the joke and the entry could not be found on the site earlier this week.

Not surprisingly, the campaign has been greeted by some cynicism. Sunday Independent columnist Gene Kerrigan begged to be spared from “the bright, chirpy people . . . getting in our faces” and said the competition would involve squandering a couple of million euro.

THE POLITICS.IE website echoes this scepticism with comments such as “another FF generated scheme to keep the people occupied and not thinking of revolution”. One online user says “I spent 10 minutes knocking all the ones I read, some of the stuff they were suggesting has existed for years, then I got bored”.

But the people behind Your Country, Your Call say they are not daunted by the scepticism. Padraig McKeon, managing director of Drury Communications, is a member of the campaign’s steering group alongside people such as Dr Martin McAleese, former Bank of Ireland governor Dr Laurence Crowley and Hewlett Packard’s Martin Murphy. He says they were expecting the competition would be greeted with scepticism from some quarters, but everyone is entitled to an opinion. However he disagrees “fundamentally” with the thesis that good ideas won’t help. It’s understandable that people are angry about what happened in the past, he says, “but it is what it is and we can learn from it . . . we can start by looking forward”.

Asked about the quality of the ideas submitted, he says diplomatically that some are not what the organisers are looking for because they are based on a single action, or have not grasped the scale of the task. Ideas that could have fulfilled the criteria if they were not already in place would be the introduction of a co-operative movement, or the International Financial Services Centre, he says.

But the steering group is “quietly satisfied” at the number of ideas coming in and the public response to the initiative. He has heard of companies, groups and families coming together to brainstorm in an effort to generate a winning proposal. Mr McKeon points to the campaign’s Facebook site which has more than 8,100 fans and to the thousands of comments and votes registered on the competition website.The competition is open to anyone over 18, and, up to last Friday, the website had been viewed by more than 27,500 people from 80 countries.

Asked if the winning ideas have yet been entered, Mr McKeon says it’s impossible to say, but all will be revealed when the results are announced on September 17th. The competition closes on April 30th.

In the meantime, the ideas keep flooding in. In the time it took to write this article, 40 new ideas appeared on the website. They include developing a 200-acre national organic farm in the Phoenix Park, getting every multi-millionaire to give €100,000 to the State, selling advertising on postage stamps and creating advertising panels on the country’s bridges.

IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE. . . SHARING THEIR IDEAS

WHAT IS IT?

Your Country, Your Call is an online competition looking for ideas that will create jobs and prosperity for Ireland. Two winners will receive €100,000 each and benefit from a development fund of up to €500,000 per project.

HOW DID IT START?

The idea came to Dr Martin McAleese about 18 months ago. It is administered by An Smaoineamh Mór, a not-for-profit organisation chaired by former Bank of Ireland governor Dr Laurence Crowley. Directors include Martin Murphy, managing director of Hewlett Packard Ireland and Eugene McCague, chairman of Arthur Cox solicitors.

HOW MUCH IS IT COSTING?

Some €2 million has been donated by 13 contributors. Their names will be published on the website yourcountryyourcall.com in the coming weeks. The campaign is also supported by organisations and individuals who have donated services and facilities free of charge.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The competition closes on April 30th. A judging panel, chaired by former EU Commissioner David Byrne will whittle the entries down to 20 in June and then to five, in August. The two winners will be announced on September 17th.