Anglo Irish bank is costing the Irish Taxpayer €25,000,000,000. Do you ever wonder what else you might have been able to do if we had that 25 Billion to spend ourselves…. he SBP complied a list of 100 things we could have done eith the money, here are a few of the best ones.
Ireland could make a major contribution to fight global poverty:
96 Buy up and extinguish the national debt of Bangladesh
93 Asphalt every trunk and regional road (110,000km) of substandard countries in sub-Saharan Africa
Ireland could become a world science and technology hub:
92 Start our own space programme, with 20 €1.2 billion space shuttles
91 Foot the bill for a century of global research into nuclear fusion (the current 30-year global ITER project is expected to cost between €5 billion and €10 billion)
86 Build a space elevator
We could decide to give ourselves a break:
84 Pay the interest on everyone’s mortgage for four years (€147 billion of mortgages at 4 per cent is €5.88 billion a year)
82 Offer everyone on the live register €100,000 to emigrate (we could afford a 50 per cent take-up by the 466,000 on the dole)
78 Scrap fares on all forms of public transport, intercity and commuter trains and buses for 33 years
We could treat ourselves:
77 Run the world’s best ever lottery – every Irish citizens is entered into a draw where 25,000 people become millionaires
75 Fly the adult population of Ireland to Las Vegas, and give everyone €10,000 to gamble with
71 Buy a 32GB iPhone, a 64GB iPad, a 13’’ 2.13GHz MacBook Air and a 27inch iMac for every person living in Ireland
We could treat the world – it might make the rest of the world like us more:
69 Buy a pint of Guinness for everyone in the world to celebrate Arthur’s Day (and it would count as exports)
66 Send 225,000 people to do the Harvard MBA
We could truly become the world’s biggest sports fans:
65 Buy the world’s 20most valuable football clubs, worth €9.6 billion, wipe out their debt (€2.3 billion) and move them to Ireland, building each a 75,000seater stadium (€600million each, based on cost of Aviva Stadium)
61 Buy 83,300McLaren supercars
60 Buy the entire stock of tickets and merchandise for all premier league clubs for the next 12 years
We could decide to become a major player on world markets. Banking and finance got us into this mess. Surely they can get us out . . .
59 Buy €600 billion in credit default swaps on Ireland (could pay off nicely in the next few years)
58 Buy two of Asia’s largest banks –Bank Central Asia and Malayan Banking
57 Recapitalise all the banks in Europe that failed the stress tests
We could just do it because we can . . . ten ways to really spend €25 billion:
51 Buy Steve Jobs (€25 billion is the actuarial value on his life) and get him to work for Ireland Inc
50 Buy gold plating 1.75mm thick for O’Connell Street
44 Hire Bertie Ahern to speak for 95 years
43 Purchase carbon credits to allow us to burn 3,000 square miles of hardwood forest
42 Build 20 copies of the Burj Khalifa Dubai, the world’s tallest building
We could just splash the cash
37 Build 50 cruise liners akin to Carnival Splendour or Queen Mary 2
32 Endow one university to the level of Harvard
23 Buy every house and apartment listed on Daft.ie and still have €12 billion left to refurbish them
We could transport ourselves out of this mess With €25 billion in our back pockets, all those pie-in-the-sky superprojects would no longer be pie in the sky. Here are ten ways Ireland could put itself on the global superproject map:
22 Construct our own channel tunnel from Rosslare to Pembroke (based on the cost of the Jack Lynch Tunnel)
19 Build 11,150miles of dual carriageway
15 Build 12 new Luas lines
We could pay for improved public services – here are some slightly more practical ways to spend €25 billion:
9 Pay for cervical cancer vaccines for every girl going into first year for the next 8,333 years
8 Reduce the pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools to 1:10 for the next 20 years
7 Give an ultra-high-speed fiberoptic broadband connection to every single house (including those in ghost estates)
1 Or we could buy one broken bank.
Oh, hang on. . .