Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has set a target of making his party the largest in the next Dáil with the leading role in a new Government.
In his keynote address to his party’s national conference in Galway last night he said the objective at the next election was a new government led by Labour.
“I am determined, that at the coming general election, the Labour Party will run enough candidates, to enable the Irish people to make Labour the largest party in the next Dáil, and to lead the next Government.
“Yes, I understand, only too well, the height of that target, the size of that task. But our country is broken. The exchequer is broke. The banks are broke. And too many families are broke. We have to fix it,” he said.
He said a new government led by Labour would waste no time getting the country back to work and reforming the way it works. “As part of our jobs strategy, Labour will take €2 billion from the Pension Reserve Fund and establish a Strategic Investment Bank that will put €20billion to work in our economy.”
He pledged that in its first budget Labour would establish a dedicated jobs fund, to finance measures that create and support employment such as a PRSI break for companies that create new jobs and more direct support to firms for research and marketing development.
“It is morally wrong, economically unsustainable, and socially unacceptable to have 435,000 people on the live register. One in every three young men under-25 in the workforce are on the dole. Labour in government will provide hope and opportunity for all those who have no work.
“Labour’s jobs fund would finance an ‘Earn and Learn Scheme’ that keeps people in employment while upskilling.” He said it was almost ten years since Labour first proposed a new way to organise and fund the health service through universal health insurance.
“Fianna Fáil rejected it. They said it would be too bureaucratic. Instead, they created the HSE. “They said it would cost too much. But ten years and ten billion Euros later, more and more people are now coming around to Labour’s plan, including last week, the Irish Medical Organisation.”
He also said that in government, Labour would establish a Department for Public Service Reform, and introduce the overdue reforms in the way parliament works. "It is time, in my view, for a fundamental review of our Constitution. There is much about the Constitution that has served us well, but it is document written in the 1930s for the 1930s.
“A time when one church was considered to have a special position, and women were considered to be second class citizens. And if we are to truly learn from the experience of the last ten years, then we need to look again, in a considered way, at the fundamental rules that bind us together.”
“Our constitution belongs to the people, not just to political institutions. So, this must be a people’s process. What I propose is a constitutional convention. A coming together of all strands of Irish society to redraw our Constitution.
“The constitutional convention would include experts and specialists, but would also include individual citizens, randomly chosen to serve in much the same way that we choose juries.
“Charged with the task of keeping what is best in our constitutional tradition, and to develop a new constitution, fitted to our times and our aspirations. Let us set ourselves the target to have it ready for the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising, that seminal moment when our state was conceived,” he said.