THE LABOUR Party leader, Eamon Gilmore, is expected to call on his party today to change itself if it really wants the Irish people to entrust it with the task of changing the country in the 21st century.
Mr Gilmore is due to address a new Labour Party commission, established by a motion of the party conference last November.
The commission is charged with examining and reporting on all aspects of the party's organisation, campaigning and political activity and to make recommendations on the role which Labour should take in the modern Ireland.
The commission, chaired by Greg Sparks, who served as programme manager for Dick Spring when he was tánaiste between 1993 and 1997 will hold its first meeting in Dublin today.
There are more than 20 members on the commission, representing various areas of the Labour Party, including the parliamentary party, councillors, constituency organisations, Labour Youth and the trade unions.
The commission will hold a series of meetings with party members around the country in the coming months. It is due to report to the national executive committee in advance of the next party conference which is due to take place in late November.
Mr Gilmore will address the opening meeting of the commission today and it is expected to make a major address on the direction he wishes to see the party taking in the years ahead.
He is expected to encourage the party to present the Irish people with a clear and understandable statement of what it stands for in modern Ireland, not just in relation to the immediate concerns of today, but to Ireland as it will be between now and 2020, and indeed beyond.
Mr Gilmore has emphasised in the past that Labour's values of equality, solidarity, community, and democracy need to be expressed in the language of modern Ireland to make them relevant in the lives of ordinary people.
He is expected to stress that there is a need for the party to expand the meaning of the term "Labour" to go beyond the old image of a downtrodden proletariat and Labour as an interest group representing a particular form of paid manual employment.
Mr Gilmore will suggest that the term Labour today applies to those who work for themselves, as well as those who work for employers and was not confined to paid work, but applied to those who work at caring for the elderly, for children and for those with disabilities.
He is also expected to emphasise that while Labour is the party of public services that means it should be the party of the public who use them, as well as the public servants who produce them.
Similarly, while Labour was the party that emphasised rights it should also emphasise responsibilities.
While Labour had steadily up-dated many of its policy positions it had not projected that modernisation. While Ireland had grown and changed it had not been able to project that development to the public.
The Labour leader will say that having left behind the closed, authoritarian society of the past, and provided for a far greater measure of personal freedom, hard questions now needed to be asked about the society that we had created, and about the responsibility we all have for the kind of society we will bequeath to our children.
He will also refer to the hard choice that will have to be made as the halcyon days of the Celtic Tiger recede and tightening public finances forced a more exacting scrutiny of taxation and expenditure decisions.
