The Labour president, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, has opened the merged party's first national conference by warning that transforming its fortunes will not be easy but that "our future lies together".
As delegates from Labour and Democratic Left gathered for the first time, Mr De Rossa told them that cynics who said the merger would not work were being proved wrong. Despite local difficulties and rivalries between the elements of the merged party, he declared, "people from top to bottom are making it work".
In a speech designed to appeal to the grassroots of his new party, Mr De Rossa spoke of his pride and honour in being president of the Labour Party and his determination that Ireland would see a left-led government.
His first-ever sentence to a Labour conference, spoken in Irish, won him his first enthusiastic ovation.
"As a Dubliner I am conscious of marking a very special coming together in a very special part of the country, a town and a constituency that has elected a Labour TD at every general election for over 50 years and which gave this country the finest Minister for Foreign Affairs we ever had," he said.
He made no reference to the recent public disagreement between himself and the party leader over foreign policy. The debate on Partnership for Peace is likely to be defused tomorrow morning when delegates are expected to unite behind a call on Fianna Fail to honour its pre-election pledge to hold a referendum on the subject. This position was agreed by the Labour Parliamentary Party meeting last Wednesday.
Mr De Rossa warned that the merger was not an end in itself, and that developing the party into a significantly larger political force would not be easy. "If this was all just about knitting together Democratic Left and the Labour Party into a slightly bigger small party, then in many ways it will have been a waste of time."
Mr De Rossa said the shared values of the party "will ensure that the Labour Party will never slide into some meaningless mushy political centre". He said only Labour could "spearhead a broadly based movement which breathes new life back into the political system and smashes the culture of sleaze and scandal".
Speaking on Northern Ireland Mr Quinn asserted that arms decommissioning was not a prior condition for Sinn Fein's entry into the executive, and that the establishment of that executive was overdue. "The corollary fact is that it is not unreasonable to expect a commencement of one aspect of the agreement, decommissioning, when progress has been made on so many others."
But people must accept what Sinn Fein leaders say when they indicate they cannot deliver on decommissioning in the present climate, he continued. However, the onus was now on them to show how else they envisage the process moving forward.
Mr Quinn warned against "parking" the political process in the North because of the impasse on weapons decommissioning. "A missed moment rarely returns," he said.
Delegates last night debated Northern Ireland, taxation, employment and agriculture. The party leader made a special presentation to the SDLP leader, Mr John Hume, to mark his 30 years in public life.