I did speak to one of the librarians at my local library and I'll be writing them a letter detailing my suggestions, soon. Based on the comments here, I suspect

I did speak to one of the librarians at my local library and I'll be writing them a letter detailing my suggestions, soon. Based on the comments here, I suspect a decent middle ground of a solution would be to not lend books to people who have books overdue. That'd probably fly better than re-introducing fines. The public library system here Ireland is by far the best I've seen, and it's a bit discouraging to see people exploit a public good.