Politically an easy short term thing to do is give money above inflation to all social welfare recipients and continue to turn paid for services into free ones particularly with regard to health access.
An easy long term thing to do is create a pension investment fund to protect all our incomes in old age.
Others possibilities are infrastructure based but with the problem of how to expand capacity of energy, accommodation, healthcare, education, defence etc in an economy which is pretty much flat out with effectively full employment.
Bet you Varadkar pushes to abolish USC in advance of next general election.
I wish there were more focus on clearing some of the over €200bn of national debt. We’ll likely need borrowings in future years when the finances are not so rosy. Having less debt overhanging us should make that easier and less expensive whenever that happens.
Why not use it to fix the healthcare and housing crisis?
Legislation can be brought in to cap energy prices too while they are at it.
We should make a start funding pensions – we should move to the European model of funding the pension system rather than the British model of paying it out of current accounts. This should be legally protected and all PRSI and USC should also go into this. Future liabilities are the reason that we’re pushing the retirement age but realistically a large national pension fund would be able to generate returns outside the inputs.
And instead of fannying about we should plan and build infrastructure.
Spend 10-15 billion and give Dublin an underground or overground rail network.Use Japan as an inspiration – get some Japanese designers over if we need to. And the guys who built Madrid’s metro. Plan for areas to be high density and commerical around stations, with lower density as you move away from them.
Spend more and improve transport options for Cork, Limerick, and Galway, using light rail to connect commuter towns to the big business parks and industrial estates, as well as the city centres.
Finish the motorway network, connecting Cork and Limerick, and Tuam to Sligo, Donegal, and Letterkenny, with a spur to Castlebar. When doing this use the opportunity to lay fibre trunk lines along said motorways.
Buy land to increase the size of national parks and *rewild the land*. Coillte is explicitly required to make a profit on everything they do but we need just wild areas that are barely touched.
This is not projected to be recurring revenue. It’s a windfall. We should improve infrastructure with it and start to unwind some of our thornier long term budgetary issues.
Massively improved public transport and housing pleaseeeee
This thread is a bit like that episode of the Simpsons where the town comes into a cash windfall and debates how to spend it until eventually getting sold a monorail.
Fuck pension man, build more housing from it. Most of us won’t have state pension anyways or the pension age will be raised up to 70 by then 😂
I ate a sock because people on the Internet told me to.
we need to urgently reduce the 52% tax rate to something like 48% (max). We also need to properly fund child care so as that professional women (and occasionally men) don’t interrupt their careers.
I’m no economist, but I’d love to know what the impact of changing interest rates will have on our 200B in debt when it comes to refinancing our government bonds. For example, we have about 18B euro worth of Treasury bonds coming up for renewal in 2026, and 2027. At the moment the interest rate on them is about 0.8% – so they’re costing us 150m per year (give or take). If they need to be refinanced at 4% (for example), that could jump to like 720m per year.
But I don’t actually know the real formula on this. Perhaps our debt is still very efficient.
We should use it to make a Norwegian style sovereign wealth fund
I’ve just said over on r/northernireland that, in addition to infrastructure investment via the Shared Island Initiative, some of these monies could be used to replace the grants which previously came via the EU and which the British have declined to continue providing
13 comments
Politically an easy short term thing to do is give money above inflation to all social welfare recipients and continue to turn paid for services into free ones particularly with regard to health access.
An easy long term thing to do is create a pension investment fund to protect all our incomes in old age.
Others possibilities are infrastructure based but with the problem of how to expand capacity of energy, accommodation, healthcare, education, defence etc in an economy which is pretty much flat out with effectively full employment.
Bet you Varadkar pushes to abolish USC in advance of next general election.
I wish there were more focus on clearing some of the over €200bn of national debt. We’ll likely need borrowings in future years when the finances are not so rosy. Having less debt overhanging us should make that easier and less expensive whenever that happens.
Why not use it to fix the healthcare and housing crisis?
Legislation can be brought in to cap energy prices too while they are at it.
We should make a start funding pensions – we should move to the European model of funding the pension system rather than the British model of paying it out of current accounts. This should be legally protected and all PRSI and USC should also go into this. Future liabilities are the reason that we’re pushing the retirement age but realistically a large national pension fund would be able to generate returns outside the inputs.
And instead of fannying about we should plan and build infrastructure.
Spend 10-15 billion and give Dublin an underground or overground rail network.Use Japan as an inspiration – get some Japanese designers over if we need to. And the guys who built Madrid’s metro. Plan for areas to be high density and commerical around stations, with lower density as you move away from them.
Spend more and improve transport options for Cork, Limerick, and Galway, using light rail to connect commuter towns to the big business parks and industrial estates, as well as the city centres.
Finish the motorway network, connecting Cork and Limerick, and Tuam to Sligo, Donegal, and Letterkenny, with a spur to Castlebar. When doing this use the opportunity to lay fibre trunk lines along said motorways.
Buy land to increase the size of national parks and *rewild the land*. Coillte is explicitly required to make a profit on everything they do but we need just wild areas that are barely touched.
This is not projected to be recurring revenue. It’s a windfall. We should improve infrastructure with it and start to unwind some of our thornier long term budgetary issues.
Massively improved public transport and housing pleaseeeee
This thread is a bit like that episode of the Simpsons where the town comes into a cash windfall and debates how to spend it until eventually getting sold a monorail.
Fuck pension man, build more housing from it. Most of us won’t have state pension anyways or the pension age will be raised up to 70 by then 😂
I ate a sock because people on the Internet told me to.
we need to urgently reduce the 52% tax rate to something like 48% (max). We also need to properly fund child care so as that professional women (and occasionally men) don’t interrupt their careers.
I’m no economist, but I’d love to know what the impact of changing interest rates will have on our 200B in debt when it comes to refinancing our government bonds. For example, we have about 18B euro worth of Treasury bonds coming up for renewal in 2026, and 2027. At the moment the interest rate on them is about 0.8% – so they’re costing us 150m per year (give or take). If they need to be refinanced at 4% (for example), that could jump to like 720m per year.
But I don’t actually know the real formula on this. Perhaps our debt is still very efficient.
We should use it to make a Norwegian style sovereign wealth fund
I’ve just said over on r/northernireland that, in addition to infrastructure investment via the Shared Island Initiative, some of these monies could be used to replace the grants which previously came via the EU and which the British have declined to continue providing