Friday night’s jackpot will be a gargantuan €190m, which is a frankly stupid amount of money.
OK, let’s assume for a moment that you wouldn’t just go out and buy yourself a solid gold house as well as several islands in the Pacific if you were to win Friday night’s record EuroMillions jackpot of €190m.
You’re not that selfish, are you? ARE YOU?
Instead, we’re going to put our faith in human nature in the belief that you would use such a massive jackpot to give back to the people of Ireland, and thanks to our pals at Lottoland we now know exactly how much we’d need to spend to bail Ryanair out of a crisis, how many extra hospital beds we could fund or the number of houses we could build in Longford.
Try these facts and figures on for size; this is what €190m will get you in the Ireland of 2017:
Health – Fund the HSE for nearly a week or create an extra 2,436 hospital beds per year at €78,000 per bed per year.
Transport – build 23KM of motorway at roughly €8M per KM which would be almost half the length of the M50 around Dublin or pay for roughly 380 toll free days for all traffic on the country’s most famous/infamous orbital route.
Housing – build 440 three bed semi-detached houses in Dublin, which has the highest average price in the country at €432,000 a go or throw up 2,111 equivalents in County Longford which has the lowest average price for that category of house in the country at €90,000 a pop.
Social Welfare – fund the first year costs for hard pressed young Irish couples of raising 12,666 babies (according to an AA Life Insurance study).
And what about Ryanair?
Charter 10 Boeing 737’s at €9,500 per hour for 83 days to help clear his backlog
Hire 3,040 new pilots at the reported top salary of €62,500, giving Michael O’Leary more than enough to plug the gap and stick a few on the phones to deal with the disgruntled public.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
