Smaller towns are losing out in the Government's national jobs strategy, the party's Seanad spokeswoman on employment told the conference.
Ms Kathleen O'Meara said the underlying rate of attrition in the more traditional industrial sector in regional towns was extremely worrying and tended to be disguised by the general economic buoyancy.
"Over the past 20 months, we have had 1,400 jobs lost at Seagate Computer plant in Clonmel; 1,200 jobs at Fruit of the Loom in Donegal; 260 full-time and 150 casual jobs at Avon Arlington jewellery plant in Laois; 140 jobs in Offray ribbon-making factory in Roscrea, and these are merely a sample."
The party's spokesman on agriculture, Mr Willie Penrose, said that the popular media image of poverty was of a bleak urban housing estate or inner-city ghetto, but the lush pastures of the midlands and the dramatic landscapes of the west of Ireland concealed high levels of deprivation and exclusion.
"Many people in urban areas assume that land ownership and EU agricultural subsidies ensure that all farmers are affluent when, in fact, only a minority of farmers receive incomes above the average industrial wage and many considerably less."
Mr Penrose said a recent study by the Combat Poverty Agency had shown that people living in the open countryside or in villages and towns of less than 3,000 people were more at risk of living in poverty than those in larger urban areas.
Calling for prison reform, the party's spokesman on justice, Mr Brendan Howlin, said that prison capacity would be doubled in a few years. "On March 4th last, 1,420 prisoners were in cells without toilet facilities. Slopping out is still practised in Mountjoy, Cork, Limerick and Portlaoise," he said.
