I learned my socialism, my republicanism and my commitment to the Irish language through Fianna Fáil. Those three values are based on the idea that politics is about making things better for everybody in society. My father served briefly as a member of a local council in the 1940s. His view would have been that it was an honour to serve. My father's greatest boast about Fianna Fáil was to point out in my home town of Athy, County Kildare, the houses that had been built which transformed the lives of people who, effectively, had lived in the late 1920s and early 1930s in mud huts. For the first time such people were living in decent housing and within a generation their lives were transformed. That is the sort of Fianna Fáil that I was brought up with.