Get off your Áras and win a big cash prize

NEWTON'S OPTIC:IT IS a great honour to learn that my name has been put forward for the Irish presidency. I must pay tribute to Fianna Fáil for considering yet another British citizen to succeed the current incumbent. Some might find it strange that a unionist would aspire to this office, but I think it is adorable that Ireland has a president, as I was just saying the other day to the Emperor of Cornwall.

To show how seriously I take the southern Irish region, my wife and I are launching Get Off Your Áras, an inspirational transformational campaign offering big cash prizes for game-changing ideas to move us all beyond the era of playing games for big cash prizes.

As we look to the future it falls to us to use the coming decade wisely. In Ireland we have always known the value of coming together, as you can see from this black-and-white footage of people working the land after killing its Protestant owners. For hundreds of years the concept of the mehurghill nourished our nation, with neighbours coming together to cough phlegm into communal soup cauldrons. Today the land lies under bungalows and five-star golf courses, due in no part whatsoever to those who might nominate me for president. Yet we can still have faith in the many-faced facets of our collective brainpower.

Get Off Your Áras is a competition, but it is much more than that. It seeks to identify completely new ways of doing things, then license them to my wife’s consultancy firm. It belongs to and is open to all: young, old, urban, rural, employed, unemployed; and here’s a picture of a black girl as well. It welcomes ideas from all walks of life, although it has just occurred to me that this expression might offend wheelchair users. Have we enough money left for a final edit here, love, just in case?

I want you to think of Get Off Your Áras as a modern day mind-mehurghill. However, I do not want you to think of Spock’s mind-meld when I use this ridiculous expression, even though it is bound to pop into your head. Nor do I want you to ask why we don’t just hang a suggestion box outside the Dáil. A mind-mehurghill is not just a national suggestion box. It is a conceptual coughing of ideas-phlegm into the intellectual soup that nourishes the knowledge economy. As past generations have proved, the Irish are at their best when they take the soup. Now we need the fresh, radical thinking of a new generation clever enough to come up with original ideas, yet still dumb enough to sign away their intellectual property rights. So get involved in Get Off Your Áras. My wife and I don’t want to end up in one of those bungalows.