Leader's speech:This is an edited version of Eamon Gilmore's keynote speech to the Labour Party conference
Thank you all for your kindness to me and my family over the past few days. It means a lot.
I am very glad to have got here at last! I could never have imagined that it would have been this difficult to get to address my first conference as party leader.
I want to pay a personal tribute to my predecessor, Pat Rabbitte. Thank you, Pat, for five years of relentless work, and for your principled leadership of our party.
I am fortunate to have Pat's experience available to me, as well as that of Ruairí Quinn, as I set out to lead Labour into the future.
It is a great honour to be the 10th leader of the Labour Party and to welcome here tonight our three new deputies, elected to Dáil Éireann last May: Joanna Tuffy, Sean Sherlock and Ciaran Lynch. And I welcome our six new Senators. One-third of Labour's Oireachtas members are new. They demonstrate how bright our future is.
There may be some in politics who feel sorry for themselves, and who on €6,000 a week are falling on hard times. Not us.
We are all gathered here tonight, members of the Labour Party, from every part of Ireland, from different backgrounds, personal and political. Each of us with our own story. But all of us with a common purpose.
We are in the Labour Party in some cases because of a personal or local or workplace injustice which stirred us to action. For others, it was perhaps a family tradition in the Labour movement.
And for more - simply a belief in a better and fairer society, and a safer and peaceful world. A conviction that poverty can be ended. That the ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity can shape our new times, just as surely as they inspired James Connolly and Jim Larkin in theirs.
We are here because of what we believe. And belief, however much it is shared, is a very personal thing.
Me? I believe that every person is equal. It is as simple as that.
That's what makes me a democrat.
That's why I am a socialist.
And why I belong to a social democratic party.
This basic idea that people are equal, and should be free to pursue their potential, in a society where we look out for each other, is what distinguishes the politics of the Labour Party.
That's why we insist on equal treatment for the sick, fairness at work, respect and tolerance between people of whatever gender, religion, sexuality or race. Labour always puts people first.
Sometimes I hear people say that it is hard to understand what Labour stands for. Or even ask if Labour is relevant at all to modern Ireland.
Relevant to modern Ireland? Labour made Ireland modern. Rights and freedoms, which we all now take for granted, were won by the Labour Party and its allies, often in the face of bitter conservative opposition. Many of those who pontificate now about Ireland's modernity were those who bitterly opposed each modernising step.
It was Labour who gave women the right to the same pay for doing the same jobs as men; Labour which brought in the laws which protect our rights at work; Labour which introduced the legislation on equality, on standards in public life and freedom of information; Labour that freed separated people from the dogmas of the past and allowed them remarry if they so wish.
It was Labour that made it legal to buy a packet of condoms. And we are still modernising Ireland. Our Civil Unions Bill is a simple measure of equality that can and should be supported by all parties in the Dáil. Shame on those who didn't.
Today's New Ireland is an uncertain place.
We have been economically successful beyond our greatest expectations. But we are nervous about how long more the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger can be sustained.
There is unease too about the kind of country we have become.
Do values matter any more? Why has life become so cheap on the streets? And why are some people so disrespectful of the rights of others that a new term - "antisocial behaviour" - had to be invented to describe their activities.
Why did a brave woman named Susie Long have to die and why can't this rich country get medical treatment for its small population, on time, reliably and on budget?
We don't think about it all the time, but climate change is catching up with us, and we have to wonder what the planet will be like for our grandchildren.
We look forward, but some are never done looking back.
I see the Minister for Education is getting more interested in history. At taxpayers' expense she has sent books about Eamon de Valera to every school in the country.
I grew up in a house and family that respected de Valera, and I can tell the Minister a few things about history.
Eamon de Valera would never have taken fistfuls of cash in a suitcase.
Seán Lemass, if he had the money they now have, would never have tolerated the inefficiency and waste in the health service.
And Jack Lynch would never have turned his back on Shannon.
We have become a country on auto-pilot, with no clear idea as to where we are going. Drifting around in the present, with little sense of the future. Led by a Government which is out of touch, overpaid, and cares only for their own survival.
Ireland needs a New Purpose - we need to get a sense of national direction and aspiration. A common cause, to inspire the allegiance and the imagination of the New Ireland.
We need a vision for our country, and its place in the new expanded Europe and increasingly globalised world, over the next two or even three decades. Building on the New Republic. Moving Ireland onto the next stage of our progress, the next phase of our country's history. A New Purpose for the new Ireland.
That means investing more in education, research and innovation. We need to take Irish education to new heights.
Thirty-five years ago, I was the first ever in my family to go to university.
Back then going to college was a unique privilege. Now it is a necessity, because it is education that drives a knowledge economy. And it is education that makes us free to live full lives in the new society.
We cannot afford to have 165,000 under-35s in our workforce without a Leaving Certificate. Or to have one in three children in some schools with a serious reading difficulty. Or to have only 6,700 Leaving Cert students with an honour in maths from which to draw all the scientists and engineers and accountants of the future.
Our purpose is to end poverty.
In Ireland today, one in every nine children live in poverty. Despite the country's economic success, poverty remains an inherited condition, lingering on from one generation to the next. A country which sets its sights high has no place for poverty, or the cycle that perpetuates it.
But we will not abolish poverty just with more welfare payments and more welfare officers. We will end poverty when we extend the ladder of opportunity to every child in this State and to their families. The key to ending poverty is access to universal public services, and the opportunity to succeed. Making sure that everyone can get a good education, can live in a decent home and can work their way to a better life.
The grossest form of inequality in today's Ireland is to be found in our hospitals and healthcare system. When somebody gets sick, they should be treated for their illness and not according to their means.
Healthcare is at the heart of our new purpose.
Healthcare is now, and always will be, a community service. Even the super-private clinics so favoured by Government will be reliant on tax breaks to make them viable.
We need a fundamental shift, to empower the patient, and to begin to construct a health service that is worthy of the Irish people.
It can be done. It is possible to fix the health service. After all, there are only four and a quarter million of us. About the population of Greater Manchester. Fixing the health service means building hospitals and health centres. And we are not short of builders. It means staffing them and fitting them out with the best equipment.
And, of course we have to pay for it, and the best way to do that is through universal health insurance, which will put the patient in control and deliver the efficiencies that we all know are needed.
Our purpose over the next two decades is to create a better future for this planet.
The next 10 to 15 years are all that remains of our window of opportunity to turn the tide of climate change. It is the defining challenge of our age.
There must be a place in our community for every child.
A child with a disability should not be a threat to the State, but a priority. The rights of citizens of a republic should not be resisted by legions of lawyers, but they should be respected, vindicated and provided for. So let's save some money on lawyers and just hire the ABA teachers instead.
We now have schools being opened on an emergency basis to cater for the children of immigrants. Did we witness the end of apartheid in Africa, only to see the day when, here in Ireland, a baptismal certificate would become a latter-day pass book?
And to be fair, I don't think the churches ever thought to see it either.
Community-building is our purpose.
It is in our communities that we will win the war on crime.
The surge of gangland killings hasn't come from nowhere. Gardaí, teachers and community workers across Ireland can tell you the little children today who are likely to be gang members 10 years from now. The indifference of middle-class cocaine users finances the drugs trade that kills so many of its working-class footsoldiers.
We must confront the gangs with the full might and force of the State. But we must also fight a battle within our communities for the hearts and minds of our young people. As part of that battle we must reinvent policing, so that genuine community policing becomes the norm in An Garda Síochána.
This then is Labour's New Purpose.
To build the New Economy.
Universal third-level education.
Ending poverty at home and abroad.
Halting climate change.
A health service that cures.
Stronger, fairer neighbourly communities.
This is our vision of Ireland, and of our place in the world.
Don't let some wizened, weary cynics tell us that all this is unrealistic, that we are naively dreaming. We have heard that before, and look how much we have achieved.
That ideal of service and patriotism is so necessary now.
Meitheal.
Dóchas.
Tír Ghrá.
Cuspóir.
Cuspóir nua an Lucht Oibre.
Níl aon cosc na limistéir ar an aidhm ata agamsa don Lucht Oibre agus d'Éirinn.
For Ireland and for the Labour Party, the question is not how far we have come, but how far can we go.