Ruairi quinn biography of barack

Ruairi Quinn's autobiography unwittingly shows how the pressures of modern politics and public office determine agenda at variance from initial ambitions

In the penultimate sentence of his 411 page autobiography, Ruairi Quinn writes: "The advocacy of ideas, the mobilisation of support, the pursuit of democratic power and the implementation of change in the path that we must follow".

It is a path that he appears to have wanted to follow at the outset of his career; it is a path he patently did not follow (even on the basis of his own account) in the course of that career.

Ruairi Quinn is a well-read, reflective, concerned person and, as such, unusual in Irish politics.

He read many of the great works of politics, including Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism, as well as works by James Connolly, Marx and Engels.

He was propelled into politics by d