There is nobody more thrilled than Ruairi Quinn himself that he has achieved his life-long aspiration to become leader of the Labour Party. "When Dick Spring became leader in 1982 - given that he was 10 years younger than me - I felt that this was an ambition that wouldn't be fulfilled. I got on with the rest of my political career".
Ten days after Dick Spring's resignation (which he hadn't anticipated at all and wouldn't believe until he was told personally) - Ruairi Quinn moved into the leader's office yesterday.
He is already espousing a new philosophy for Labour, redefining the role for the left in changed circumstances. He knows there is a perception out there that he would roll over for Fianna Fail. He believes that the Labour constituency is no longer "your caricature cloth-cap working class". He holds that President McAleese's election reflects an Ireland in "the post-Catholic era". But, most of all, he is determined that Labour will be in government after the next election.
With the shift in electoral strategy which he presented within an hour of his election, would he rule out going into government with any party?
"Well, I don't think we could have worked with the Progressive Democrats, as they used to be," he says. "But they appear to be a spent political force without the same ideological drive they had before.
"I don't know if the PDs will be in the Dail after the next election. I understand that Mr O'Malley is not going to contest the next election. I have heard similar suggestions about Mr Molloy. And, given the volatility of Dublin voters, they may not be there . . . I don't think the issue will arise for that reason."
He has reservations about answering the "hypothetical" next question. Would he insist, as his predecessor did, that Democratic Left would have to come into government with them to protect Labour's left flank? "This is all hypothetical of course. It depends on the numbers," he responds.
It would be very premature, he says, to lay down preconditions in advance of an election result. "Yes, I would prefer to see DL there with us rather than outside," he adds.
Turning to the perception that he would roll over for Fianna Fail, he acknowledges that this may be due to his attitude to Northern Ireland, on one front, and his advocacy in 1992 that Labour should participate in government with Fianna Fail to implement the Labour agenda.
"I am out to get the best deal possible for the Labour Party and for the Labour Party's constituency. You can't get the best deal if you are only going to deal with one side of the house. The fact that we are now in a position to contemplate a coalition with either side means that we will get a much better deal with whoever we go into government with. And that can only be to the benefit of the Labour Party," he explains.
He agrees "very much so" that he had reservations about some of the Fianna Fail culture which had come to the fore in recent times. "There is still great unease among many, many people. If you look at a lot of the planning chaos in the Dublin area, it is, in my view, unashamedly attributed to the culture of rezoning that Fianna Fail epitomised but, I have to say, with the active support of Fine Gael," he states.
Mr Quinn argues that the economic circumstances that dictated left and right politics have been totally transformed. But the values of left and right have not disappeared. Simply put, a rightist agenda, to use Mrs Thatcher's famous phrase, is an agenda which recognises that there is no such thing as society, that people have to be rewarded excessively for their individual merits to the point that you don't have any social provision other than a minimalist role for the State in security, a police force, and so on, he says.
"A left version is that I don't believe that the market is perfect. I think that market distortions continue all the time. It was Adam Smith who said that whenever two or three businessmen gather together, the first thing they do is conspire to confuse the market. I think there is a very positive role for the State to play in regulating the market," he continues.
Mr Quinn instances the labour market as a classic example. The rightist position would be to have no intervention measures in the labour market. Just simply reduce income tax to zero point and people will automatically come to work. Yet the evidence right across Europe has been that there are some people, particularly longterm unemployed, who cannot get into the market by that mechanism alone.
"You simply have to do some of the things that I have been associated with for the last 15 years - like the Social Employment Scheme, now called the Community Employment Scheme, back to work schemes and a whole lot of other things to do that."
The new Labour leader believes there is a very real role for the left but it has to be redefined in terms of the new circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Asked to outline the big issues for the left now, Mr Quinn asserts that there were three streams to the agenda of the Labour Party over the last 20 years. The first was getting centre-stage on Northern Ireland and getting a compromise based on the recognition of the validity of the two traditions. Dick Spring's role in all that has been "seminal", he says, and when history is written from a reflective point of view, the common thread in all that will be seen to have been Dick Spring and the Labour Party.
The second stream was the social agenda, moving from a confessional State to a pluralist republic, and properly available family planning, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and divorce were the big issues to be done. His experience of the 1986 divorce referendum, in particular, convinced him that they would not get those changes put on the statute books or enacted by referendum without Fianna Fail's participation in government. "That's done business. It's over. It is no longer relevant," he concludes.
The third stream was dealing with the public finances. The country was seen as an economic basket case 10 years ago.
He had argued, particularly in foreign interviews, that the biggest contributor to the extraordinary economic story was the successful role of social partnership. "That will not continue unless the PAYE workers, middle-management people and people on salaries, at whatever level, are properly incentivised," he says.
The former Minister for Finance maintains that that is not just about tax. It has to be about deepening the partnership. For example, IBEC cannot continue to presume that there will be another social partnership agreement if they don't deepen the partnership at local level. That means, not to put a tooth in it, the recognition of trade unions as negotiating arms at local level.
"But, trade unions, for their part, also have to realise that they have to become relevant to the modern needs of workers. That you cannot have a closed shop. All that the Government can do is to ensure that the unions have a right to organise but, after that, the unions have to persuade workers to join in a particular area," he continues.
Mr Quinn firmly believes that people who are creating the wealth should have access to proper profit-sharing, share-ownership participation if that is relevant, and an ability to say, "Right, we will be responsible in terms of moderate wage increases so as to maintain out competitive position but if the company makes more than 10 per cent profits, or it has a turnover above a certain level, then that should, in part, be redistributed to everybody on some form of pro-rata basis."
Defining the Labour constituency today, the new leader says that the very name of the party indicates that they are about people at work, enabling people to get to work, to stay at work, to get a decent wage at work that will enable them to provide the services that they want for themselves or pay taxes so that the State can provide them more efficiently or more effectively.
"Our core group," Mr Quinn says, "is the traditional Labour constituency. Those people who have to go to work to put bread on the table. But they are no longer your caricature cloth-cap working class. People don't aspire to be working class."
Working-class families that he knows - many in Dublin SouthEast, in places like the inner city and Ringsend - they want their kids to get education. They want to have a middle-class lifestyle and they know that in order to do that they have to get education. They need access to employment possibilities. "We want to lift the expectations of those people and enable them to fulfil them," he adds.
Though his brother, Lochlann, is chairman of Allied Irish Banks, Mr Quinn is not shy about commenting on the 30 per cent increase in profit just announced by the Bank of Ireland.
There probably is a case for looking at the taxing of banks in a particular way if they continue to make very strong profits of this kind and if these profits cannot be recycled back into the economy in terms of business, he says. He would like to see the banks taking more risks in Irish venture companies.
"They will protest very vigorously that that is what they are doing and they certainly have improved their position relative to five or six years ago", he comments.
Mr Quinn believes that President McAleese's election reflects a post-Catholic Ireland. He thinks we have become a pluralist society. The President, who is clearly a very committed Catholic, he says, has as much right to be elected as anybody else.
The new leader would not regard himself as a "green nationalist" though he would have been seen as such within his party for years. His Northern roots are very interesting.
His father, Malachi Quinn, who lived in Co Down, was very actively involved in Northern politics. He fought in the War of Independence with two of his brothers, one of whom was a Sinn Fein judge.
After the War of Independence, his father and his uncle, John Quinn, fought on the Republican side in the Civil War. One of them died as a result of wounds, the other lost his leg. His father ended up doing six months in Crumlin Road jail in 1923. He got a notice in the late 1930s that if he didn't get out of Northern Ireland within 24 hours, he would have been interned for the duration of the second World War.
That is how Ruairi Quinn, who spent a lot of his youth with relatives in Northern Ireland, came to live in Dublin.
He admits to having an extraordinary affection for Northerners. There is a fusion of Presbyterian work ethic and Catholic imagination that blends itself quite uniquely with entrepreneurial flair and creativity.
The new Labour leader, who has attended SDLP conferences, in good and bad days, in and out of office, for more than 20 years, would not regard himself as a green nationalist. Quite the contrary.