PD briefing:Market regulators should not be allowed to operate in a vacuum and should be held "strategically accountable", said Tánaiste Michael McDowell.
Mr McDowell said the PDs would amend the law to allow the Government "to issue a public-policy directive to any of our market regulators".
Launching his party's proposals in Driving Further Employment Growth & Prosperity, he also said the PDs would invest €8 billion in science, technology and innovation, and would "fund national broadband coverage".
He said Irish people "carry the lightest direct tax burden in the EU", stressing the PDs influence on successive governments. "The driving force of this economy was set by the PDs," he insisted.
"The best defender against poverty is a job. The correctness of our approach, and success of our low-tax, pro-enterprise model, has been borne out spectacularly. Employment has risen from 1.1 million in 1991 to more than two million people employed today, 600,000 of which have been added in the last 10 years."
Competition in the domestic economy was a driver of efficiency, and the PDs "will provide for Oireachtas policy direction to market regulators, reforms the operation of management companies, strengthen the Competition Authority, ensure adequate retail zoning by local authorities and continue reform of the public transport market".
He said the model of regulation needed to be changed. Regulators had been "launched into orbit like a space rocket" and "independence of the regulator is not a value in itself".
Regulators had to be strategically accountable to the Irish people, and if the regulation was in place to allow the Government to issue public-policy directives to regulators, the recent large-scale energy price increases because of a spike in costs "would not have happened".
Mr McDowell said there had been much comment about job losses, but "they are being placed by newer, high-quality jobs".
He pointed to the party's Kildare North candidate Jeff Aherne as an example of how Ireland had changed.
Mr Aherne (30) said his family had emigrated twice in the 1980s to Australia, he got his degree in Wales, but the economic changes meant a return to Ireland, and as a mechanical engineer he had worked for Intel and now operated a web-based car sales company with his father.
