Recently a business columnist likened the Irish National Organisation (INOU) of the Unemployed to a stranded garrison of Japanese soldiers in the jungle, still fighting a war that was long over. Mike Allen wrote a sharp retort, pointing out that the difference between the INOU and the Japanese was that the latter had lost their war. Nevertheless, he accepts that the columnist had a point. The main theme of next week's annual conference of the INOU will be where the organisation goes from here.

When it was set up unemployment had risen every month for seven years and Irish unemployment was the highest in the EU at 20 per cent. Now it is well under 7 per cent. And while there are still almost 200,000 out of work, the nature of the problem has changed.

"The first question we have to address is who we represent," Mr Allen says. At INOU meetings issues such as low pay and poor working conditions are as likely to arise nowadays as rates of social welfare or the latest labour market initiatives. One of the resolutions down for debate at the conference calls on the INOU to withdraw from negotiations on a successor to Partnership 2000, because national agreements have "completely failed the low paid and the unemployed".

The national executive will be opposing it, primarily on the grounds that social partnership has generated more than 300,000 jobs, 189,000 of them full-time. Nevertheless, the executive's own motion also condemns the widening gaps in income; not only between those at work and those on the dole, but between high earners and the low paid.

Mike Allen says that one of the first questions the organisation will have to face is how far it should go in addressing issues like low pay and poor working conditions - traditionally a prerogative of the trade unions - as opposed to refocusing the debate on unemployment. Ironically, the jobs boom has helped to further marginalise the unemployed, whom many people write off as the unemployable.

Many of the long-term unemployed live in the most deprived of our communities, which Mr Allen believes have paid the highest price for the long recession of the late 1970s and 1980s. The local authority housing policies of the 1980s aggravated those problems, "so that we have very, very high levels of unemployment and people growing up in communities with low morale and tending to recreate the problem. Having an unemployed father is very likely to lead to early school leaving and, that is very likely, in turn, to lead to young people becoming unemployed themselves."

However, the INOU now has to decide its new priorities in a world where many people no longer see unemployment as the primary policy priority of Irish society. Simultaneously the needs of those left on the Live Register are becoming increasingly complex. For instance there are rural unemployment areas, where there are few obvious options to migration to find jobs. There are urban areas like Ballymun or Moyross, where educational disadvantage is a barrier to work.

Then there are the problems of the low skilled, the older unemployed, lone parents, Travellers, immigrants and those with disabilities. There are even new poverty traps created by some employment initiatives.

Mr Allen says that the INOU has to start asking itself who it represents. "Do we represent everyone who is jobless and wants a job? If so, do we prioritise the needs of those in the most poverty, or the long-term versus the short-term unemployed?"

These questions are already causing divisions within the voluntary and community sectors. He sees much of the debate as poorly thought out.

Some people, for instance, argue for equality-of-access to schemes for everyone. "Assuming a scarcity of resources, the people who will get pushed to the back of the queue are those unemployed longest. We would argue for prioritising those at the back of the queue."

He accepts that some people, especially women, have suffered structural disadvantage over a long period of time, but he does not accept the view of some women's groups that, therefore, all women are disadvantaged. He also believes that the uncritical defence of some labour market initiatives are misplaced.

One example he cites is Community Employment (CE). Some women's group oppose changes because they might adversely affect lone parents, who now comprise 40 per cent of CE participants. But Mr Allen argues that "support for lone parents should be aimed at helping them progress to the mainstream labour market, not to recycle them through schemes".

Similarly, he criticises those "who say that conditions on CE schemes should be better, because they believe people will remain on Community Employment. No one should have to live their lives on CE programmes".

His own experience of redundancy in Galway in 1984, and the State's response, still exasperates him. When Information Services closed with the loss of 130 jobs the workforce tried desperately to keep it going as a co-operative, but the IDA strategy was to attract a big-name investor. "Robert Maxwell was interested," Mr Allen recalls. Fortunately he didn't take the bait. "Maybe it was because we didn't have a pension fund," he muses.

The INOU has never been slow to question its role in the past, nor has Mr Allen. When he initially took over as general secretary of the organisation in 1987 it was as a three-month holding operation. He has now being doing the job for 11 years. From one man in an office, on loan from the Irish Trade Union Trust, he is now responsible for running an operation with 22 staff and an office in Belfast, as well as Dublin. Like other INOU activists he sits on a number of consultative bodies, including the National Economic and Social Forum, where the INOU has made much of the running in debates on employment initiatives and the social economy.

Mr Allen has also written the most comprehensive study of Ireland's unemployment problems in The Bitter World, published late last year. It has sold modestly well, but has failed to reach the wider audience it deserves.

He finds it embarrassing to talk about his salary of £24,000 (€30,474), which is a huge amount compared to the basic income of most INOU members. But it is significantly less than the salary of a branch secretary in SIPTU, and far less than trade union leaders earn. It also means that he has been able to stay with the organisation and oversee its development when most of the other founding activists have moved on.

As an employer, the INOU has also learnt some of the problems viewed from the other side of the negotiating table. It realises the importance of emphasising the positive aspects of recruiting unemployed people at the negotiating table with other social partners.

In its early phases the INOU encountered a lot of scepticism from the trade union movement, as well as employers. That has largely been dissipated. Some unions, particularly SIPTU, have become much more willing to work with the INOU and other groups in the community and voluntary sectors.

However, the INOU structure is more like that of IBEC than a trade union. It has 50 branches with 1,000 members, but it also has a confederate structure involving 180 unemployment centres.

The branches tend to be to the forefront in its campaigning role. The centres provide a wide range of services for the unemployed. Unlike IBEC and the ICTU, its ultimate aim is to put itself out of business. Even with the current boom that seems some way off.