Buoyed up by two comprehensive by-election victories after only four months as party leader, Ruairi Quinn is planning a bright and innovative future for the Labour Party.
It will involve getting rid of historical baggage; repositioning the party firmly at centre stage with a friendly approach to business and wealth creation; embracing and developing a pro-European role and long-term planning for economic and social development.
The first step in that direction will be taken at a special delegate conference in Dublin in two weeks' time, when the challenges ahead and the changes required will be dealt with by the party leader.
His experiences as minister for finance in the last government have clearly shaped Mr Quinn's view of the world. The need for forward planning by governments and political parties, rather than responding to crises, is a dominant theme.
Ordinary people arrange their finances for 20-25 years ahead when they take out a mortgage, he says, but governments fail to do that. That was why planning for the future shape of Europe and for Ireland's place and influence within it was so important, as effectiveness depended to a large extent on preparation.
A common presumption that Mr Quinn would lean towards Fianna Fail as a future government partner, rather than Fine Gael, is rejected in a pragmatic fashion.
The Labour leader speaks of the "very good" personal relationship that developed with John Bruton when the Fine Gael leader was Taoiseach and he was minister for finance - the first time members of different parties occupied those positions - and says he would be "more than happy to see such a government being formed again".
Such an alliance would depend on an acceptance by the electorate of the Labour Party's new policies for change and modernisation and its ability to get those ideas accepted within a programme for government.
In advance of such developments, however, Mr Quinn is "not ruling out any political option".
"If the people want another rainbow coalition with Fine Gael, the Labour Party, Democratic Left and, perhaps, the Green Party, then they will have to give us a majority. If the people choose to vote in a different way, then the Dail will have to produce a government. It is the electorate rather than the Dail that selects the government," he said.
Any decision on government formation would, in any event, have to be put to a special delegate conference of the party and would require a majority vote.
As for Labour's association with Democratic Left and the prospect of a future merger, Mr Quinn said their relations were "infinitely better" than before 1994. Democratic Left had "come out of what had been the Workers' Party Stalinist shell" and was a very different party.
They had got to know and respect one another while in government and a working group now existed to deal with areas of common interest and to explore ideas.
He and Proinsias De Rossa had met a number of times recently. But it was up to Democratic Left itself to decide what its future relationship would be with the Labour Party.
Turning to Sinn Fein, he believed Gerry Adams was trying to lead his party towards a historic compromise on Northern Ireland and he wished him well in that endeavour. However, Mr Quinn did not think Sinn Fein was any different from the IRA and he quoted Bertie Ahern to the effect that the two organisations were different sides of the one coin.
He hoped a settlement could be reached, as it would represent a "massive endorsement" of Dick Spring's work while he was minister for foreign affairs.
Mr Quinn's three immediate objectives were: to revamp the organisation, attract new members and install a computerised system at head office; to generate policies to reflect the new realities of a vibrant economy and a changing society within Europe; and to improve the performance of the parliamentary party and reflect the social issues affecting the lives of young people.
Membership of EMU would pose particular challenges to society, he said, because of the surrender of traditional levers used to manage the economy, such as exchange and interest rates.
The Labour Party leader was particularly scathing of the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, and his handling of the exchange rate issue. His policy of allowing the financial markets to set the Irish rate of entry for EMU was "outrageous", Mr Quinn said, because it was importing inflationary pressures. Those costs might not show up in present inflationary figures, but they were being absorbed into the system and would eventually be reflected there. An exchange rate of DM2.50 to the pound was, he felt, acceptable.
In preparing for EMU, Mr Quinn said the social partners would have to agree methods of managing unexpected shocks to the economic system, in order to protect employment and prevent large-scale redundancies.
Mortgage-holders would have to be encouraged by government to change their variable loans into fixed-rate borrowings, to be reviewed every five to seven years.
And the public sector could no longer expect to be bailed out if things went wrong. "In the past, when governments pleaded inability to pay because of economic circumstances, public sector pay was rolled up and paid out in full at the end of the economic programme. We will not be able to afford that in the future. The cost of any downturn will have to be absorbed by the entire community," Mr Quinn said.
Another area of tension may involve the restructuring of the labour market within the welfare state. During the last general election, the Labour Party favoured extensive reforms of the dole system.
Mr Quinn supported the idea that nobody between 18 and 25 should automatically qualify for the dole. Instead, they should be offered education, job placements, vocational training or community work in areas of choice. The same held true for long-term unemployed.
Would such an approach weaken Labour's traditional relationship with the trade union movement? Mr Quinn accepted that trade union influence has decreased since Dick Spring's electoral success in 1992. Party leaders were traditionally drawn from the ranks of trade union officials. But that changed with Mr Spring. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, no less than the Labour Party, had been modernised in recent years, he said, and they were "no longer in each other's pockets". But they still maintained extremely good relations with one another.
There was no triumphalism following the party's double by-election success. Mr Quinn was almost self-effacing in his comments. The Government was not under imminent threat, he insisted. Labour had been fortunate in the quality of its candidates.
But expectation finally seeped through - and political ambition caught fire. The double win might, Mr Quinn mused, be the equivalent to the turning point of 1990, when Mary Robinson was elected president. Improved morale on that occasion had helped the party to win a large number of county council seats in 1991. And it created a basis for Dail success in 1992.
Mr Quinn predicted the party would return two, if not three, MEPs in next year's European Parliament elections - up from one MEP today. It had already sketched out the bones of a county council election programme and expected to do well in 15 months' time.
But Europe is the main forum of change. Mr Quinn speaks animatedly of European construction and of the need for courage in transferring "more sovereign powers in the areas of justice and home affairs and a common foreign and security policy, to democratically accountable institutions in Europe".
Inherent in what he says is the ultimate acceptance of a common defence arrangement and the ending of Ireland's traditional neutrality. But Mr Quinn sets limits to such developments and says any changes would have to be endorsed in a referendum. He does not favour membership of NATO; he finds it "unacceptable" to rely on the military might of the United States and believes, instead, that the EU must develop its own peace-keeping and peace enforcement mechanisms.
He points to the three types of EU membership that now exist: the old imperial powers of Britain, France and Germany, the neutral states of Finland, Sweden, Austria and Ireland, and others like the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark. By 2010 there would be 21 member-states in the EU and new arrangements and legal statutes would have to be agreed to allow for flexibility and change in a post-federal Europe.
Because of its economic success, he believed Ireland is moving from a position where it responded passively to European proposals to one where it could seek, with other small member states, to dictate the kind of future it wanted for itself and for its citizens.
After the high of winning a double by-election victory, anything may seem possible to Mr Quinn.