The conference condemned Government plans to disband CIE, claiming there were plans to sell off the three State transport companies to "right-wing friends" of the Government.
While the Government is currently planning to establish the three companies as independent state-owned entities, the motion claimed they were to be sold. Their purchasers "will be only interested in plundering the substantial assets of the companies, leaving us with a third world transport infrastructure as happened in Britain during the Thatcher years".
Referring to Government proposals to allow private operators run some Dublin bus routes, the party's transport spokeswoman Ms Roisin Shortall said the privatisation of buses and rail services in Britain had been "an unmitigated disaster".
Opposition to privatisation of Iarnród Éireann, Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus was not "a device simply to protect the interests of workers in semi-state companies, but in this case it is about protecting the interest of public transport users." She said the relationship between the State and CIE had never been put on a satisfactory footing. "CIE has been expected to be commercial, but it has been dogged by political interference. Neither was it recompensed properly for the socially necessary but financially unviable services which it is required to provide. CIE has been expected to be a commercial body and an instrument of social policy - an impossible dilemma."
Ms Breeda Moynihan Cronin TD also said Labour was opposed to the privatisation of the Great Southern Hotels. The conference is taking place in Killarney's Great Southern Hotel, in Ms Moynihan Cronin's constituency of Kerry South. The hotel was "one of the great bastions of Irish tourism", she said.