The current failure of government, or governance, had become the "single biggest barrier to a decent quality of life" for Irish people, the leader of Fine Gael, Mr John Bruton, said yesterday.
There were far too many examples of Government indecision, he said, which stemmed from the very top and worked its way down.
"The Taoiseach seems to have a decision-making problem," Mr Bruton said at the publication of his party's Plan for the Nation yesterday. "We have a wealthy nation where nothing run by the Government seems to work."
There would be a general election within the next 12 months, and probably the next seven, he said. The task of Fine Gael in government in 2001 would be that of an engineer whose job it would be to clear the many bottlenecks in the government machinery.
"We will be taking over a country that has expanded so fast that supply no longer matches demand, where inflation is rising dangerously and where social peace has broken down because the country has run into severe delays and bottlenecks in the making of the provision of basic service."
Fine Gael would make changes by introducing competition, setting performance targets and working "flat out" to restore the equilibrium between supply and demand that existed when his party was last in government.
The cost of implementing this plan, he said, was more than £2.8 billion extra over a four-year period.
"For every one of the delays or bottlenecks I have referred to is controlled by Government. Private-sector services, like telecommunications, are surging forward, ahead of consumer demand. But Government-provided services have slowed to a snail's pace, creating impatient queues in their wake, slowing down the initiative of our people, restricting supply and thus bidding up prices."
Inflation, he said, was a problem of governance. "A problem of scarcity of supply caused by ineffective Government leadership. The Celtic Tiger of the liberated Irish economy cannot move forward, because the Celtic Snail of government is blocking its way.
"These delays are stealing from us that which is most precious, our time, as we find ourselves neverendingly queuing for a life, queuing for a quality of life that always appears further away." Too many people in Ireland, said Mr Bruton, were stressed out by the three pressures of traffic, their mortgage and family responsibilities. "Children lose out. Extended families and community networks are under strain. Personal crises are increasingly faced alone."
The party's finance spokesman, Mr Michael Noonan, said the calculations were based on the economy growing between 5 and 6 per cent over the next number of years, and the figures were based on the range of available resources within that costing.
The current spending costs of the plan are broken down to: Housing £85 million; Health £750 million; Education £325 million; Child Benefit £352 million; Transport £31 million; Environment £65 million; Other Social Services £187 million; Justice £33 million; Miscellaneous £87.5 million; Overseas Development Aid £300 million.
There would also be extra capital spending over and above that contained in the Government's £42 billion Development Plan, which included, for example, an extra £630 million capital spending on housing.
In response, Fianna Fail criticised the plan, saying it boldly underlined the lack of vision and imagination within Fine Gael.
The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said it had taken the party exactly a year to present what amounted to a revised version of its original Plan for the Nation.
"The result shows that their policies have not moved on and that Fine Gael was never more out of touch with the electorate and the needs of this country," he said in a statement.