• Date: 13 March 2021
• Published date: 13 March 2021

But many of us also don't yearn to go back - or not to go back to exactly the way things were. The pandemic gives societies an opportunity to push the reset button and introduce social, economic, legal and political changes that will enhance our lives into the future.

Here we focus on 16 transformative ideas with the potential to enhance Irish society - so that when we go back, we also move forward.

1. Holidays

Pop-up camp

sites Change manager and entrepreneur Aisling Costello's ConTenTed is a social innovation for the camping community that links up campers and public and private landowners. The aim is to give people options to go to eco-friendly pop-up camp

sites in scenic locations.

Costello believes that ConTenTed could offer space, tranquility and freedom from locked-up lives for those who are looking for a way to reconnect with family and friends in a safe environment, while experiencing the great outdoors.

"I love camping and my research found that four out of five people enjoy camping but not necessarily in Ireland. I realised that this is because they wanted big, spacious sites in nature with activities like walks and cycles direct from the campsite, and these pop-up sites can provide just that," she says.

She also discovered that for short trips people don't need a lot of facilities on site. So, through her website, contented.ie, campers can check out when a landowner offers a weekend of camping. They can either bring their own tent or rent a luxury one on site.

"With guidelines for the logistics of toilets, insurance, parking, security, etc, all from an eco-friendly standpoint, landowners don't need to reinvent the wheel and campers don't need to worry about the environmental impact of their experience. And of course with camping, social distancing is guaranteed," she adds. Contactcontented@gmail.com

2. Health

A specialist centre for infectious diseases

"Covid has given us a scare and moving forward, we will need to have a [dedicated] centre with expertise in infectious diseases," says Prof Jack Lambert, clinical professor of infectious diseases at University College Dublin and consultant in infectious diseases at the Mater hospital.

The Mater has a six-bed isolation unit to handle very small numbers of people with highly infectious diseases that are deemed to be of "high consequence". Lambert suggests Ireland needs a national infectious diseases centre that could provide training, education and resources to other hospitals in the future.

"It would be the referral centre and a resource centre to support other hospitals. We've seen how smaller hospitals have struggled during the Covid-19 pandemic. And Covid is not an isolated event because there have been huge changes in the last 10-20 years in zoonotic diseases - diseases that spread from animals to humans - in part due to global warming, so we need a centre that could plan for our responses to future pandemics," he says.

3. Housing

Cheap retrofitting loans

The national Climate Action Plan aims to retrofit 500,000 homes by 2030, yet just more than 6,500 homes were retrofitted to a B2 BER rating in 2018 and 2019 combined.

Many people have spent more time than ever in their homes during the pandemic and, arguably, have become more aware of the costs of keeping them warm. Yet in spite of grants for up to one-third of the costs for improving the energy efficiency of our homes, Irish people are still reluctant to get the work done.

Laura Heuston of consultancy business Sustainability Works says that this is partly due to not wanting the disruption of having builders in our homes. It is also because people haven't fully realised the benefits of warmer homes with lower heating costs. But not being able to afford to pay the other two-thirds of the costs involved is perhaps the biggest deterrent, and many commercial lenders are reluctant to offer cheap loans to fund the works.

Sustainability Works proposes a new model in which homeowners can get long-term, low-cost loans from commercial lenders to fund retrofitting. In this model, a one-stop shop would signpost the sources of cheap finance to homeowners, while also connecting them to certified retrofitting experts.

With such a model in place, the homeowner would be assured of quality work and the commercial lenders would be able to provide the low-cost finance when a grant scheme supports some of the costs of the retrofitting. A new report from Sustainability...