The Labour Party has lost its activist campaigning dimension, according to the party leader, Mr Pat Rabbitte.
Speaking to Labour Youth's annual conference in Limerick, he called for a renewed campaigning force which would strengthen the party.
Mr Rabbitte pointed to the campaigning spirit of the Green Party.
"The Greens embrace a new agenda and have recognised the importance of parliamentary representation and engagement in parliamentary politics."
He also acknowledged that the Green Party in Germany had come to hold a significant "swing" position and had used it to achieve participation in power.
Recent cutbacks and undelivered Government promises had renewed interest in politics, the Labour leader said.
"This has prompted people to join Labour but we have to sustain this interest and maintain the inflow . . . we must go out, campaign and attract.
"People feel cheated and misled," he continued. "The medical card promise in the Fianna Fáil election manifesto was a fraud, a cynical lie."
The Government had promised to bring an additional 200,000 people into the scheme, "but the limit remains as it is, in the recently published Book of Estimates".
Mr Rabbitte said that disillusionment with conventional politics had nurtured a preference for the "new movement" or the "global justice movement".
"This new movement includes single-issue politics and related activism and campaigning."
It also included, he went on, environmental concerns including concern about the cost of economic growth and defining sustainable growth; ethical concerns, including the ethical treatment of the Third World as well as the ethics of business, big business in particular; concern about technology, its control and use, for example in the sphere of genetics; anti-globalisation, which was not to be equated with isolationism; gender issues and war and peace.
The Labour leader told the conference that he recognised that many of these were old issues which Labour had embraced for decades.
He said socialists were seen by the "new movement" not to be fully engaged or even to be suspect in respect of some of these issues.
"The new movement is not socialist," he said. "Indeed, while it is anti-capitalist, it is suspicious of socialists and socialism.