Today Mr Des Geraghty will be formally appointed president of SIPTU by its national executive. He succeeds Mr Jimmy Somers, who retired last month. Mr Geraghty will bring his own dynamic approach to the job, but he will also be continuing a policy of modernisation that began in the mid-1990s.
SIPTU's general officers operate very much as a triumvirate. The president is responsible for policy and strategic development, the vice-president for industrial relations and the general secretary, who is currently Mr John McDonnell, looks after administration and personnel.
Although Mr Geraghty was associated with the old Workers' Party wing of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union and Mr Somers with the dominant Labour Party grouping, both men have always had a good personal relationship and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving.
The amalgamation of the ITGWU with the Federated Workers' Union of Ireland to form SIPTU proved remarkably successful, not just in uniting the State's largest two unions but in forging a new unity of purpose.
When Mr Ed Browne took over as SIPTU president he appointed Mr Geraghty, who had just returned from a stint as a Democratic Left MEP in Europe, to head the union's Strategic Development Initiative.
The SDI breathed new life into union structures. Today SIPTU is spending almost £500,000 on training and education courses for members and carried out the most extensive consultation with its members ever undertaken by an Irish trade union to find out what their priorities were in talks on a successor to Partnership 2000.
Like most DL activists, Mr Geraghty is now in the Labour Party himself. Meanwhile Mr Somers, who has been elected treasurer of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, will continue to play an active role within the wider movement.
It will also ensure there is still a strong SIPTU presence at congress level during the talks on a successor to Partnership 2000. There are no plans to elect a new SIPTU vice president before the spring.
One of the dividends of SIPTU's organisational overhaul is that it has a lot of backroom expertise to maximise its input to partnership talks; not just on pay but in areas such as taxation, pensions and infrastructure.
At the same time the investment in training means that local activists have been negotiating Chapter Nine gain-sharing deals on the ground under Partnership 2000.
If Mr Geraghty and Mr Somers are, in their different ways, exponents of an older style of trade-union activism, they have been laying very firm foundations for the future.