Labour Party Conference is taking place in the Hotel Kilkenny from today until Sunday. I’ll be travelling down by train later this afternoon, as there is a joint meeting of the National Executive Committee and the Parliamentary Labour Party (all Labour TDs, Senators and our MEP). For reasons that remain a mystery to me, the media have been invited to attend the first hour of this meeting, which will be addressed by The Boss and Dr. John Crown. So keep an eye out on the news this evening – you might catch a glimpse of me in my rather fetching tie!
The regular conference then kicks off tomorrow morning at about 10am, with about 40 motions over the following day on a wide variety of topics. I’m delighted to say that some of these motions are very well crafted indeed, and will lead to a significant development of party policy in a range of areas. On Sunday morning, Greg Sparks will also hold a Q&A session on the much-discussed 21st Century Commission recommendations.
There are also a number of very interesting fringe events happening over the weekend, two of which I’ll be speaking at. The first, tomorrow, is on lessons we can learn from the Obama campaign. Having blogged about this recently, I’ve been roped in (by Keith) to speak on lessons we can learn in relation to organising, which should be fun actually. On Sunday morning, I’ll be speaking at a Labour LGBT fringe event, in advance of World AIDS Day on Monday. Our topic is ‘World AIDS Day December 1st – Are we ready to face the challenges of HIV/AIDS?’, and I’ll be joined by Rebecca Moynihan and speakers from Johnny and Open Heart House in a session chaired by Niamh Hayes.
I’ll post both of my (brief) presentations on Monday probably, and we’re hoping to have video of at least one of these fringe events available after conference.
In the meantime, Labour will once again be setting the lead on online coverage of our conference. You can follow myself, Keith or the official Labour tweets over the weekend, while there will be various people blogging, posting videos and other assorted activities over on the main Labour site. As we were last year, we’ll also be on Ustream, while RTÉ live will also be covering the conference.
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