LEADER'S SPEECH: This is an edited version of Eamon Gilmore's address to the 65th Labour Party conference at NUI Galway
NATURE HAS given us a beautiful homeland. Our bright and resourceful people for generations have worked hard to set it free and make it prosper.
Is cúis bróid, gaisci ar laochra in ealaíon, litríocht, ceol agus spóirt.
Ireland is a great country. But our country has been laid low by the reckless actions of a feckless few.
On this spring evening, Ireland lies wounded. Injured by greed. Emotionally drained because the very institutions which were trusted by most have let us all down so badly.
It is now personal. The job losses, the business failures, the mortgage defaults, the cutbacks are no longer just items on the nine o’clock news. They are in our own families, among our own neighbours and within our own circle of friends.
We worry. Mostly about what the future holds for our children. Can we afford their education? Will they get a job? Will they too have to emigrate like the generations before? It has to change.
We could spend all night complaining about why and how it happened. How greed was allowed to win out over the generous instincts of the Irish people. Why self-interest was promoted over our natural inclination for friendship and working together.
How an arrogant and inside clique hijacked our country. But that gets us nowhere. We have to change it, and make up our minds to stay focused and determined to do so.
To help Ireland recover. To take back ownership of our country. To secure the future for our children. To make sure it never happens again.
Change is never easy. Just ask anyone tonight whose world has been turned over by the loss of a job or a business, or by huge cuts in income. But the one place where change has not happened, and where it needs to happen most is at the top. In the Government.
Brian Cowen and Fianna Fáil think they can stay in office for another two years. Just think about it: For the next two years, while families are suffering from their cutbacks and businesses are struggling to rebuild and workers are trying to hold on to their jobs, and those out of work and graduates coming out of college are trying to find their first job, this country is to stay handicapped with a clapped-out Government that is now more concerned with restoring its own political fortunes than with recovering prosperity for the people. After all that has happened and the high price we have all had to pay for it, they still insist that they are the ones who are always right. That nobody but them can govern the country. How more arrogant can they get? They need to be taught a very simple lesson by the Irish people. Fianna Fáil do not own this country and they do not have a monopoly on governing it.
At the end of the day a country is not a government, or a political party, or a church, or a bank, or any other institution. A country is its people. Its people and the values they hold to. It is time to take back our country and to get rid of Fianna Fáil.
But the political change we need now is not just from one crowd to the other crowd. Not just a swap of faces or of political affiliation around the Cabinet table. We need change that is deeper and different.
The Labour Party is offering to lead the next government.
I say “offering” because in a democracy to govern is to serve the people, not rule over them. And because we have to travel a difficult journey to recovery more than ever we need to trust those who are leading us on that road, that they share our values and decent instincts and that they themselves know something of hard times.
Everything in the history and the DNA of the Labour Party and in our collective and personal life experiences has readied us for this challenge.
Smaoinim ar mo shaol féin. Ag fás suas anseo i nGaillimh. Na deacrachtaí a bhí againn. An cruacht agus fuacht a bhain leis an bochtanas. Ach an saoirse a thug an t-oideachas dúinn. An misneach a mhothaigh mé ó mo mhuintir agus mo mhúinteoirí.
Taithí an saol a d’fhoghlaim mé ó bheith ag obair taobh le taobh le daoine óga, agus le n-oibrí chun a gcearta a chruthú. An grá agus an dóchas a thagann le togáil clainne. An sasamh oibre agus an onóir bheith i mbun saothar an phobail.
Let me be bluntly clear about this. Our objective at the next election, whenever it is held, is 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. A new government led by Labour will waste no time getting our country back to work, reforming the way it works and putting an end to “working the system”. Labour is the party of work. And jobs are what will rescue our country from the depths of this recession.
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 €20 billion to work in our economy. The new bank will have a joined-up approach, providing finance for innovative companies and small firms that are the backbone of this economy, but also helping to finance the infrastructure that they need to succeed.
In our first budget, Labour will establish a dedicated jobs fund to finance measures that create and support employment. Such as a PRSI break for companies that create new jobs. Such as more direct support to firms for research and marketing development.
Moving ahead with projects such as school buildings, that are ready to go. Driving ahead our plan to promote building insulation so we can create jobs, lower fuel bills and cut emissions at the same time.
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.
Labour’s graduate and apprentice programme will provide work experience for 30,000 young people – to break the cycle where you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job.
Labour will set up a tax-back scheme to fund full-time study; skills exchanges to help maximise the expertise available for retraining.
We have had enough bad investment in property. It’s time for some good investment in people. That, too, means investing in our health. We have great doctors, nurses, health workers, all trapped in a failing system.
It is almost 10 years since Labour first proposed a new way to organise and fund the health service. It would bring together the resources already being used in a more focused, intelligent and fairer way. Making sure that money follows the patient.
And that medical need and not money decides who is the patient in the first place. We called it 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 10 years and €10 billion later more and more people are now coming around to Labour’s plan, including last week, the Irish Medical Organisation.
Labour believes in good public services. Labour respects public servants.
We want public service reform, so that the services remain and are improved and that the public service is a good place in which to work.
In government, Labour will establish a department for public service reform, to get on with the job rather than just talk about it.
And in politics, too, we need to modernise the way our country is governed. Within weeks of being elected, a Labour-led government will introduce the overdue reforms which will make our parliament belong more to the 21st century than the 19th, and we will start the process of devolving real power and responsibility to local democracy to enable people and local communities reconnect with democratic decision making.
But we need to go further.
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 10 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.
The journey we face now won’t be easy. It is the road to economic recovery, through the challenging terrain of reform, a journey to deliver our children safely to a secure and sustainable future.
This is a journey that we must travel together. As one Ireland. Our nation is too small, and the crisis and dangers we face are too great for solo-runs or for putting sectional interest before the common good.
This is not the time for division and conflict. This is the moment when we must all pull together.