Dear Mr McCreevy, use the Budget to tax people’s bad behaviour

DEAR Minister McCreevy, This is a pre-Budget submission.

You're knee-deep in them. You may not want another, because pre-budget submissions are mostly about vested interests and charities getting stuff off their chests.

Because media print the key points of each, bodies like IBEC and CORI can send out press cuttings to prove to their members how hard they're working on their behalf. Each is looking for money or looking to prevent someone else getting money.

This present submission, on the other hand, proposes using the Budget to make people behave.

Taxes can change behaviour for the worse: witness how many of the Georgian buildings you pass on the way to work have bricked-up casements because of a daft nineteenth century tax on windows that encouraged people to cut off their own light.

However, taxes can also improve behaviour. A Budget making unleaded petrol noticeably cheaper than leaded, caused a big shift to unleaded. It was a potent incentive to drivers to become environmentally responsible.

Well, all right, it was a bribe. So? What's wrong with using the tax system to bribe citizens to do the right thing? We're not talking brown paper bags, here. We're talking about using tax carrots and sticks to evoke a better Ireland.

Take, for example, gridlock. Last week, Dublin's was particularly brutal. (Must have been all those TDs coming back to Dáil Éireann after their mid-term break.) It was so bad, I was convinced I'd be drawing the old age pension before reaching home each evening.

So, on Friday, I stayed home all day. One car less on the road. Twice the work done. Minister, you have the opportunity to multiply this happy outcome right across the nation.

A tax concession for companies to allow or empower employees to work from home one day a week would take thousands of cars out of our cities.

Taking thousands of patients out of our hospitals would be good, too. The Minister for Health is doing his best. He's making sure smokers will have to stand in the February rain, freezing their whatsits off, in order to have a cigarette.

Any chance you could support that with a tax incentive for companies providing quit-the-fags courses for employees?

What's that you say? You can't engineer public morality by taxes? Of course you can. And make money for the State in the process. Here's how. Make every problem behaviour a revenue-generator.

On-the-spot fines for public drunkenness, for starters. Anyone who can afford enough drink to turn into a disgusting nuisance can afford to pay for people to clean up after them.

Raucous city pukers might learn a lesson if their night out cost an extra €120 in fines, and the apparently unending supply of them would generate one hell of an income stream. Temple Bar alone would generate millions for the Exchequer every month.

Which brings me to Michael McDowell and the 2,000 extra gardaí. Instead of adding a wing to Templemore to breed them in, he should re-define the mission of the Garda Síochána so they go back to being guardians of the peace and crime fighters.

All the traffic management tasks inconsistent with that core mission could then go to a separate self-financing traffic corps dedicated to catching speeders, drunk drivers and those who ignore the rules of the road.

The traffic corps wouldn't need years of training. They'd do most of their work through remote control cameras or through "spy-on-the-driver" tachographs in every new car purchased. The fines levied would pay for the corps and their equipment: a cost-effective way of saving lives.

It would also put an end to the need to hump Irish roads. (Pardon the expression.) Just when Britain is flattening its speed bumps because they play hell with emergency vehicles travelling to accidents and fires, Irish suburbs are having speed bumps put in.

INSTEAD of paying road crews to destroy our roads by putting humps in them that wreck our cars, the money could be spent instead on Gatso cameras on every suburban street feeding details of bad driver behaviour into central computers.

This would remove any need for speed bumps while allowing you to crank revenue out of every infringement.

You may say, minister, that this wouldn't deliver sustainable income, because drivers, once they knew about the cameras observing them, would start behaving themselves. Two answers: 1) This would be bad? 2) Irish drivers will never, ever learn to behave themselves so well as to impoverish the proposed traffic corps.

And another thing. Toll every new road. Give people the choice: travel a rubbish road for free or pay up to use a good road.

One of my Northern friends can now commute every day to work in Dublin because of the new motorway north of the capital. He says that from the moment he passes the airport, he's an hour and 20 minutes from his home in Belfast. Is he willing to pay a toll for that? Is he what!

(While I'm on about cars, given that you lot abandon Leinster House over Christmas, you should open its car parks to shoppers prepared to cough up 20 to leave their cars all day in such a central location.)

My final proposal is this: privatise tribunals. Your colleagues, the PDs, are really into privatisation, so they'd love to see tribunals commercially sponsored instead of on the public payroll.

Nor would it be difficult to attract sponsors: Tribunals are entertaining, create their own stars and earn loads of media coverage, so the sponsor's brand name would get great exposure.

Instead of the Mahon Tribunal you'd have the Smarties Tribunal. Or the Red Bull Tribunal. Or the Zip Firelighters Tribunal. Move them to big venues like The Point or the Opera House.

Take a royalty on each performance. Talk about a win for the public finances

Better stop at this point or I'll get run over by Fr Sean Healy. (A serial pre-budget submitter, if ever I saw one.) As you'd say yourself: G'luck, now.

Terry.