SIBLINGS: Musician Rossa (33) and politician Aengus Ó Snodaigh (40) grew up on the seafront in Sandymount, Dublin 4, in an Irish-speaking house with their four brothers and their parents, Cliodhna Cussen and Pádraig Ó Snodaigh.
Rossa is in the world music band Kíla with his brothers, Rónán and Colm. Their new album is Kíla - Live In Dublin and they are on a countrywide tour. Aengus was elected a Sinn Féin TD at the last election and lives in Ballyfermot with his wife Aisling and children Fearghal (9), Lorcán (6) and Éadaoin (1). The youngest in the Ó Snodaigh clan, Rossa has a four-month-old boy named Tarach - from the Hindi meaning "protector" - and lives with his partner, Róisín Loughrey, off the South Circular Road in Dublin.
ROSSA
When we were young, Aengus and the older brothers were downstairs and the younger ones were upstairs. We had our own kind of life and they had theirs. Everyone in the house had their jobs. Mine was to take out the cutlery and Aengus's job was to lay the table so it would annoy him when I didn't do my job because it would mean he couldn't do his.
Sometimes we would dig turf in the Dublin mountains and make mud balls to fire at each other. Aengus had all the best tactics. He was really good at playing soldiers; he used to set up big huge wars with those green and blue plastic soldiers. He would spend a week setting up an entire war. The other thing he was great at was fixing bikes. He was brilliant with his hands.
There was a defining moment for me during our childhood. Aengus would have been about 16 and he was playing football on the grass by the strand when a park keeper told him to stop. He was doing nothing wrong so he stood his ground. Next thing you know, a police car pulled up and he was bundled into the car. I remember that feeling of helplessness and the sense of injustice.
I once got into trouble for selling An Phoblacht for 25p at school so I had to give it up. I remember Aengus going to a big march outside the British Embassy for the Hunger Strikers and coming home with his head split from a baton.
Aengus is very honest, very helpful and great craic. The band played at the celebration party for his election. When he first started going out canvassing, the Special Branch followed us around and people said that our posters were devaluing their houses. That kind of abuse just makes you stronger and closer.
Rossa was a hyper child, happy-go-lucky and full of life. He always had a group of kids around him, getting up to all kinds of mischief. Sandymount was a great place to grow up.
We would wander around the place collecting driftwood in a trolley from the beach to burn for firewood. Us older ones used to take control of an old building on a piece of wasteland and be attacked by the younger ones who threw everything at us.
As we grew up, Rossa would come to me for help with school things; because I was older I was like a resource in the family. There was an element in our family where you questioned things; our father encouraged that. There was a sense that if you are wronged you should stand up for your rights. If a decision had no logic, it was only natural that you would question the authority behind that decision.
AENGUS
I think Rossa's music is great but I am not a musical person at all. Sometimes I think the three brothers in Kíla robbed all my musical talent. I admire what they do because they like to be different and make a statement, they are not willing just to along with things to be commercial. Kíla would be a lot richer if they succumbed to the kind of things other bands do.
My kids call Rossa the monster - he always has time to play with them. He is very generous with his time. He is always happy and jolly and I have very rarely seen him depressed. Sometimes he can be a bit scattered and all over the place, but he seems a bit more settled lately.
In conversation with Róisín Ingle