The worst thing in life is to have no aim, the Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, tells Mark Hennessy.
Most speeches made to conferences quickly disappear into the ether, following quiet applause and a rush for dinner and the bar.
Yet a few can live on after the chairs have been piled up, the conference hall cleared and the speeches are posted on little-used websites.
Judging by the reaction, one such speech was the Ombudsman's address to the Céifin conference on social change in Ennis, Co Clare, last month.
It celebrated recent economic success but bemoaned the aimlessness, materialism and selfishness of much of today's life.
Sitting in her office in Leeson Street in Dublin, Emily O'Reilly is still surprised by the scale of the reaction: "Incredible, it was incredible," she declares.
Originally, Céifin organisers had wanted her to chair a session rather than speak: "I hate chairing things. I thought I wanted to say something.
"They said, OK. John Pilger was supposed to be the main speaker. I knew this was going to be Pilger's day. I was going to be the warm-up act."
Written over two afternoons during a short holiday break with her husband, Stephen Ryan, the speech was greeted with thunderous applause.
"I thought, that's very nice. But you are preaching to the converted because anyone who pays to go to a Céifin conference on values is going to be receptive."
Once it was reported by newspapers, it quickly grabbed the attention of talk radio programmes.
"I don't think that I ever got a reaction like it to anything that I wrote. People literally stopped me in the street to congratulate me.
"They said that they had sent the thing to their children.
"I feel I have to apologise to every teenager in the land because so many of them have been forced to read it.
"If I had said that two years ago it mightn't have had that reaction. There is a moment that you can capture. I was probably five heartbeats in front of other people."
For some, the speech was taken as proof that Emily O'Reilly has, like most people do, just become more conservative as she has grown older.
Though that is part of the explanation, it is not the full story, she argues: "It wasn't just the case of middle-aged people like myself reaching a certain stage in life where we tut-tut vulgarity.
"It wasn't just that. The reaction was from younger people as well. I have no doubt but that it was a reflection of Emily O'Reilly growing more conservative as she grows older. But people forget that I wrote out against divorce back in 1995 whenever. I have always had quite traditional views.
Ms O'Reilly asserts: "I have very strong views about the family and the family view and the sacredness of that. My parents are married 51 years.
"The bond that they have is just incredible, and I know myself and my siblings have been hugely influenced by that in our own lives.
"I think that that is there. That isn't conservatism. That is something that I have always felt," said Ms O'Reilly, a former journalist and now Ombudsman for 18 months.
"It was also a piece of self-reflection. During the 1990s my children were all small. Now, my eldest is 14. Suddenly I see them as teenagers about to go out into this world."
Conversations with parents of older children have left her concerned: "You do get a sense of a kind of aimlessness among kids, with huge opportunity and potential.
"There is almost so much that they can't decide on what they do, a lack of focus in their lives. That is the one thing that would worry me about my children: that they wouldn't have a focus in life, that they would sort of wander, be unfocused, or drift from course to course, or from job to job.
"We stuck in the jobs we had because we were delighted to get them.
"Each generation is different, but the worst thing in life is to have no aim, not to be striving towards something, because then it is almost a nihilistic existence in some ways."
In particular, her preference for a greater place for religion and spirituality, instead of "the new religions of sex and drink and shopping", was seized upon.
"The only thing that bothered me was that my line about tip-toeing back to the churches was sort of misinterpreted as tip-toeing back to the arms of the Catholic Church.
"That wasn't what I meant. I was talking about a general balance in life, and spirituality and religion being part of that perspective of where you are.
"There are extremes in our society that are quite frightening and go beyond similar experiences in other western European societies."
Citing binge-drinking and suicide rates, she declares: "We just seem to do everything in this country to extremes, whether it was devotion to the Catholic Church in the 1950s, or whether it is devotion to the bared midriff and the six-pack today."
For some, the speech read as a declaration that the Ombudsman has political ambitions, though she scoffs at the idea.
"It was great timing, wasn't it, if that is what it was? Absolutely not, absolutely not. That is just nonsense."
Ms O'Reilly continues: "I predict, anyway, that the next president will be in the Éamon Ryan mould, rather than somebody in the Mary Robinson/Mary McAleese/Emily O'Reilly mould.
"People always try to ascribe motives, as I would have done, but there was nothing in it for me. I was asked to do this. I did this.
"I enjoyed doing it.
"It was stuff I wanted to say and stuff I even wanted to say to myself. But that was it. There was no political agenda, or anything like that."
Society today is no more formed by inevitable tides than was the Ireland of the 1980s, she argues: "Nobody would have believed the economic transformation that has taken place.
"I don't accept that the downside of wealth is inevitable. Certain political and economic choices were made that transformed us.
"Equally, choices can be made in this society that can change it. Judging from the reaction I got to the speech - a visceral, profound reaction - there is an unease about our society.
"Maybe it is the beginning of the change away from the free-house and waking up with a hangover, thinking we must tidy up around here and get the Hoover out," she said, laughingly.
One of the Céifin organisers, Father Harry Bohan, who has been deeply involved in community development for decades, subsequently rang to congratulate her.
"He said he was struck by the number of people who had said to him how wonderful my speech was, as they boarded their flights to go to New York to do their Christmas shopping," she declares.
Pointing to the Taoiseach's admiration for Robert Puttnam's seminal book, Bowling Alone, which traced the destruction of community ties in the United States, she says: "I had actually never read it but I bought it.
"It is on my bedside table. Maybe there is something going on.
"There was a very funny piss-take on me in the Village magazine last week.
"It was to the agony aunt, 'Dear So and So, I am very concerned about the Ombudsman telling us we should all be blah, blah, blah. I am a 40-something.
'I grew up when we had nothing. Now I am having a great time, I have a fantastic car, loads of women, out boozing every night. Do I have to give any of this up?'
"Relax, calm down. No, you don't," she laughs.