Policy positions

Landing page (from Politics) for bmjphilosophy Policy positions.

= Irish domestic policy =

Irish education/R&D/innovation ideas

 * Education (Primary and Secondary)
 * Emphasis on Statistical literacy, The nuance of academic/scientific interpretation, The complexity of economics/politics, The importance of liberal world order, Coding, Bio/Chem/Phys (i.e. Pharma)
 * Education (Third-level) & Academia
 * World-leading teacher education / theory of education
 * Science seen as quintessentially Irish
 * Overseas tax-breaks better for companies investing in Irish academia
 * Integration in the CANZUK university system -- CANZUKI
 * Higher standards of Level 8 education than Britain -- Level 8 means Level 8, in-demand graduates
 * Irish specialty: Worldwide academic standards adjudicating
 * High pay for academics--but need to find a way to justify and without tenure
 * Irish specialty: Academic publishing -- highest per capita published authors in the world
 * Good organisation and integration of academia-industry clusters
 * Attractive for educational conferences
 * Irish specialty: Third-level education (highest per capita national income from overseas university fees)
 * Professional occupations
 * Irish specialty: Professional (MCQ) examinations
 * Irish specialty: EBM & clinical trials, Applied medical research, Realistic medicine, Palliative care
 * Irish specialty: Vocational training -- (like Germany) -- but with better validation, and opportunity for return to mainstream education, and rapid retraining in order to adapt to changing market
 * Talent acquisition/HR
 * Irish specialty: Evidence-based hiring for academia/tech/data science
 * Excellent at poaching top academics
 * Excellent at offering scholarships to American undergrads/postgrads in order to keep them here

Irish employment

 * Non-traditional opportunities
 * Legal/administrative infrastructure required for flexible/part-time working
 * (to maximise the role of women, to facilitate passion projects by high earners)
 * Opportunities for CANZUKI exchages
 * Opportunities for overseas charitable/non-profit work
 * Civil service
 * Elite / competitive -- HSE is a widely-respected job (not a doss)
 * Fixed annual percentage of civil service job terminations (tethered to productivity) for each department / level of seniority -- the purpose is so that the private sector is seen as the easy option, so people know what they are getting themselves in for and can't go to the labour courts
 * Irish specialty: Bureaucracy suppression in all civil service areas
 * High per capita employment of primary teachers
 * Financial rewards for families who care for loved ones themselves, best-in-world "caring for carers"

Irish housing & infrastructure

 * Low-cost living options for educated people -- to facilitate start-up culture, start-up villages
 * Data
 * Irish specialty: Data architecture, seamless data gathering, routine data analysis, data security

Irish political stability

 * Immigration
 * Australian system
 * Class / Ideological movements
 * (Don't have the answer -- do something to address the unrest which follows perceived inequality)
 * Irish value: Ideological movements are scorned as hyponuanced, embarrassingly simple, historically naive
 * Irish specialty: Home of the anti-ideological movement, rejection of non-evidence based policy in other countries, home of departisanised government, home of critique of ideological movements
 * Irish specialty: Fact-checking
 * Irish specialty: Defenders of classical liberalism--freedom to choose, personal responsibility
 * Media
 * Powerful enforcement of online libel/harassment laws
 * Non-anonymous state Twitter
 * Ireland having highest readership of nuanced reporting in the world

Irish culture

 * Language
 * Irish specialty: Celtic languages
 * Religion
 * Healthy academic discourse surrounding Christianity, post-Christianity, Catholicism v. Protestantism
 * Music
 * Irish specialty: Worldwide festivals for folk music (like Founders summit)
 * Sport
 * Tourism & Hospitality
 * Irish specialty: Tours for overseas (i.e. American) tourists, e.g. Wild Atlantic Way (Top 10 per capita income from tourism in the world)
 * Irish specialty: Food tourism, Ballymaloe-style cooking courses

= Irish Foreign Policy =

Northern Ireland

 * To pursue the abandonment of the Fenian model of reunification
 * To abandon the anti-English sentiment, accepting that there will always be loyalists in Ireland
 * To stop glorifying the death of IRA boys, but to mourn their death as brave but futile
 * To make any settlement contingent on protection of Unionism/Protestantism/Loyalism -- if the stipulations are broken it is considered a defacto invitation to repartition
 * To have three anthems -- God Save Our Queen, Amhran na bhFiann & the New Irish anthem
 * To continue the policy of GFA dual nationality for northern Irish -- there is no difference if the sovereign state is UK or Ireland, because technically it is both
 * To pursue detente with the UK
 * To rejoin the Commonwealth, so that (in keeping with GFA dualism, there is a "Monarch of Ireland, the Queen of the United Kingdom" (not King or Queen) and a "President of Ireland"--both equal heads of state, both nominal/ambassadorial roles.
 * To rebrand Ireland as the "EU part of the Celtic Isles" -- allowing Ireland and Britain to keep a foot in Europe and a foot in the wider world
 * To build a bridge between Ireland and Scotland