Ireland badly needs a new centre-right party - Here's my proposal

What about Renua ? Look what happened to them. I’d say that indicates the demand for another party in that sector.

There really are so many middle aged Journal.ie commenter type cranks on this site. Fred also hates cyclists of course.

Why do you guys even bother with these fantasies? No one would vote for this sh*t.

People will vote for it after 4 years of SF and their alphabet friends.

Groups that actually manage to get votes.

Not something this party would manage.

I would certainly say FG are well to the left of the policy platform OP is advocating

FG are completely centre-left. And the reason for this is that there isn't nobody challenging them on centrist or centre-right issues (economically). So they assume that anybody in that area will vote for them. But the reality is most of those people just end up voting for nobody, as I did in the last election (first time not voting as I could not bring myself to put a number next to any candidate in my constituency. As for the PD's - they got slaughtered because they were the minority party in the coalition going in to the election where everybody was voting for the main parties (much the same with Labour after them)

As for the OP's proposal. I would absolutely vote for such a party; not because I may necessarily agree with every minute detail, but it would certainly be a drastic improvement on the current $hite and would be in the same general area as my views.

With regards the tax proposals, I think the above would need to be balanced with an additional wealth tax brought in on income over circa 120K for single/180K for couple of 10%, along with an additional 1% on all assets over 2 million. However, I would call this a "patronage" rather than a "tax". Not because I am putting spin on it, but would be calling it as it is. Rather than the current mantra of "hating the rich", or "make the rich pay more", this patronage would be very much a recognition of how much the wealthy contribute to society. I would even bring in a law stating that at the end of every year (or around the time of the budget), every TD in Dail Eireann must, one-by-one, stand up and say "thank you very much for your patronage of this country" and along with any tax certs, anyone paying this patronage would receive a "thank you card" on behalf of Dail Eireann and the country. Finally, this money would not be for general (unionised) expenditure, but would be put to use delivering things for this country that everyone (rich and poor) can benefit from - even simple things like street, building and park beautification etc.

Which brings me to the next point about welfare. For me, this is simple. Get rid of the 101 different benefits and roll them into a few. The main one being jobseekers. When one loses their job, there would be a single payment that would pay 2/3 of the average salary the person received over the past 3 years and that's it. No add-ons regarding housing, medical, children etc. This is recalculated every year on the anniversary of first receiving the payment. The payment would be treated exactly like income and taxed as normal. As you can see, it would keep reducing every year, with the floor being 2/3 of minimum wage. This would help with a lot of issues regarding welfare, such as providing enough for the middle-high income earner who, today, has their income drastically cut when they lose their job (punishing them severely, especially when they have contributed the most, are the least likeliest to end up on welfare, and are the least likeliest to stay on welfare for too long). It would ensure that, even if someone was happy with their welfare payment, they would know that in the next year or the year after, they wouldn't be so they would need to refocus and get back to work soon. It also ensures that nobody is ever better off on welfare than they are working. Finally, it also ensures that nobody would ever go on welfare long-term or for life.

What about those the just can't find a job? Well, that is where the above patronage comes in to it. Every community would have a local "public amenities service" that would offer employment to lot of people, mainly unskilled minimum wage jobs, but also some skilled jobs, payed at market rates (and offering apprenticeships for those who are unskilled to learn new skills and level up). Their job would be to go street to street, park to park etc, and completely overhauling them one by one to make them beautiful, rather than the ugly, cheap and rundown streets that we have. For each street, they would work quickly down the street completely repaving the footpath with durable, aesthetically pleasing stone, re-doing the tarmac etc on the road, painting road markings, planting trees, cleaning/repainting/replacing signposts and poles etc, while also carrying out aesthetic repairs to the front of every building on the street (painting, windows, door entrances, railings etc), where the building owner pays for the materials, but the labour is carried out for free. everything would be done to a very high standard (unusual for Ireland!), and anybody doing a $hite job simply being let go. As well as employing huge numbers in this, it would also employ a large number of people in locations dotted around the countries who would be making all the materials - park benches, railings, fencing, sign posts, flower pots as well as nurseries for all the plants. Again, this would provide jobs from unskilled, to apprenticeships and skilled labour in woodwork, metalwork, landscaping/horticulture etc. Not only would all of this be relatively cost effective (as it would drastically cut the welfare bill) with the small gap in finances being funded by the patronage, but would result in A) the entire of society benefiting from it, B) zero medium/long term unemployment and C) greatly improve the situation with regards antisocial behaviour, where many of the people today being the ones who vandalise, damage public amenities etc being the very ones who would end up working on repairing/cleaning/replacing and, hopefully, for a significant chunk of them, taking a lot of pride in their work and not wanting to see it defaced/damaged.

the op's party would just be another failure party, a laughing stock like all of the other similar ones suggested on here over the years.

won't annoy me as it will never get into power.

Not sure where you think they are doing that, but would you mind sending them to Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford as well as all the towns and villages in the country?

As for the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied workers - yes, absolutely in this country. Immediately prior to the pandemic, there were over two hundred thousand people claiming jobseekers. That figure does not include the many other people who are on other benefits and not working (and not counted as "unemployed".