In a speech billed as "a signpost towards remodelling the Just Society for the 21st century", the Fine Gael leader has urged his party to design new solutions to modern problems.
Setting out six main issues, Mr John Bruton told a Fine Gael meeting in Ratoath, Co Meath, last night that his party must, in the next six months, look at Ireland's long-term opportunities and problems "in an honest way" and build a programme for government based on this.
He identified Fine Gael's goal as seeking "a society of justice through opportunity" and outlined his approach to the economy, work, traffic congestion, spiralling house prices, child care and the social role of young men.
Given the State's "spectacular" economic achievement, Mr Bruton said that if this trend continued, we must understand how to measure success; why we have been successful so far; and what long-term steps we must take to preserve our success.
Since the Government showed, through last week's Estimates, that it was susceptible to "short-termism" and to pressure from vested interests, he suggested that Fine Gael's best course was to demonstrate a coherent analysis of longer-term issues.
Mr Bruton said that if the State was to maintain industrial growth, it must "try to find a way to stay as young in outlook as it is today". Ireland must also find a way to sustain the "dynamism and lateral thinking that characterises its present young workforce". This was "a matter of mentality, not of age".
Describing early retirement as "a risky concept", Mr Bruton said it could become a process of wasting people and wasting talent. Accepting that people needed a change of direction at certain points in their life, a policy should be adopted of "re-orientation" of workers rather than retiring them completely.
Ireland's educational system should now begin to focus on helping mid-career re-orientation and re-skilling its workforce.
Existing educational provisions are too rigid and the opportunity provided by information technology must be seized. Individuals and firms will, meanwhile, have to get at least as attractive tax incentives to invest in training as they do to facilitate retirement or redundancy.
Turning to traffic congestion, Mr Bruton said it was an example of bad public administration. Accusing the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, of adding to "paralysis of analysis" by "wasting time on yet another longfingering of the inquiry into the Luas project", he said the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, was also unwilling to face up to the decision to issue more taxi licences.
Urging tax incentives to release more second-hand houses on to the market, he said the price of housing in Dublin and other cities hung like a Sword of Damocles over many young families and could fuel extra wage demands. Land should be serviced and developed for housing.
Men and women at work would need more flexibility to deal with long-term child care and with emergencies that arise at school or at home with children, he said.
"Children cannot be parked, the children of today are the productive workers of tomorrow. Children may need professional or paid care from time to time, but they will always need their parents on hand. They need moral as well as material support", he said.