How two million pairs of hands can help save this land of 1,000 parishes

FRESH thinking and a winning mentality. That’s what I heard the Taoiseach call for on Saturday night.

At least, I wasn’t sure whether I heard him calling for it or promising it. A bit of fresh thinking certainly wouldn’t go amiss, would it?

The only one problem is that we have an elected Government and they’re paid pretty well to apply some fresh thinking to our problems. But since this crisis started, could anyone give me even one example of fresh thinking from our powers-that-be?

Could anyone demonstrate one idea that has managed to tap into the kind of national spirit the Taoiseach was talking about on Saturday night?

When the Taoiseach was on stage, he talked about Ireland as “a beautifully complex people, a nation of a thousand parishes… Ireland holds us all together; we must all mind her now”.

And he had previously spoken about the “values that make us unique”. He described them as “values that let the world know who we are. The value of neighbourliness that bonds communities and gives identity to every village, town and city in the country. The value of respect for our elders, care for our weakest and welcome for the stranger. Our ability to create relationships and forge lasting friendships which is valued by others around the world”.

Listening, it seemed to me that in some senses he was describing the very things that have been most damaged by the greed and selfishness of the past 10 years or so. And it’s impossible not to observe that it was a certain kind of politics that led us away from the sense of community that the Taoiseach seems to value now and towards the “me only” society that more than a few of his closest colleagues seem to value.

But if it’s fresh thinking the Taoiseach wants, here’s some. If he really wants us to pull together again, here are a few ideas that might make a difference.

First of all, we own a bank now, right? And that bank has a large number of property developers among its debtors. So, as a matter of fact, do most of the banks. And it seems pretty clear that those property developers can’t repay their debts.

For some reason, the banks have appeared less than anxious to foreclose on any of those debts.

I know that if you or I went into the bank to announce that we weren’t in a position to repay our mortgage, the chain reaction that would spark off could certainly result in our house being taken from us.

So, here’s idea number one. If the property developers can’t pay, why aren’t the banks offering to relieve them of the massive land banks they hold as collateral? And if the value of those land banks has declined in recent years, why isn’t the Government saying to the banks, “listen, lads, remember all those deposit guarantees and recapitalisation moneys? Well, we’ll take some of that enormous amount of land you’re sitting on now, free gratis and for nothing, and we’ll start to build houses for people who can’t afford them otherwise”.

And guess what? In the process of building the houses, at highly competitive prices in the current marketplace, on the free land that used to be owned by the property developers before they got into so much trouble, the State could start to employ some of the thousands of construction workers left unemployed by the collapse of the property developers.

Idea number two (this one might be a harder sell to a disillusioned public). There are just around two million of us at work now — 2,052,000, to be exact, according to the latest CSO figures (although the Taoiseach may know something we don’t know about that because he used the figure of 1.9 million at the weekend).

While no one can be sure what the average earnings in the country are, we know the average wage in industry is around €39,000 a year.

Some people in the workforce are paid considerably higher than those in industry and average wages in other sectors, like catering, are lower.

But if one took €35,000 as the average, that means between the lot of us we all earn just around €70 billion a year.

Suppose we were all to volunteer a week’s wages to help rebuild the economy? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the Government was to create a National Solidarity Fund and ask each one of us in the workforce to put a week’s wages into it — spread over a year, say, or in whatever form we wanted to do it.

That would represent a contribution of around 2% from everyone at work and it would raise around €1.25 billion just from the people at work.

The fund could be set up as a bond so that it would pay interest each year and it could be redeemable over time. If the fund were to run for three years, it would raise nearly €4bn to help get the economy going again.

Of course, our national wealth is nearly twice that figure of €70bn.

The contribution made by people at work would have to be matched — if not bettered — by those who own the other half of our national wealth. Profits would have to make their contribution and so would the owners of land and property. If the contribution of the working half were at least matched by the contribution of the owners of wealth, we could raise between €8bn and €10bn.

Even that amount, of course, is not going to solve all our problems.

In fact, I believe if we ever do set up a fund like that, it ought to be dedicated to the future and particularly to ensuring that we continue to educate our young people to the highest level we can.

THERE’S one other thing we could do as a people pulling together.

There’s a term that describes all the things the Taoiseach was talking about — the neighbourliness, the community identity, respect for elders, etc. That term is social capital.

Again, it is the policies of the past 10 years or so that have diminished social capital in our country, despite the lip service paid to it.

The pursuit of material possessions, in particular, became almost a core part of the value system, replacing what was there before.

We could choose this moment to start rebuilding social capital. We could, for example, set ourselves the goal of 100 million hours of volunteering per annum. That’s about an hour a fortnight for every member of the population.

And it could make a profound difference throughout the thousand parishes the Taoiseach referred to.

If the opinion polls are to be believed, the people have already decided this Government doesn’t deserve our help.

I’m certainly not going to argue with that — the people who got us into this mess shouldn’t be the ones getting us out of it.

But Ireland needs all our help. And I really do believe that if we pull together as a community, there is still nothing we can’t do.