ANNE HARRIS has travelled from republican socialism to a position which fits well with the Progressive Democrats, a colleague has suggested.
In the 1970s she admonished Conor Cruise O'Brien in Hibernia for condemning the Official IRA members who planted a bomb at the Paratroop HQ at Aldershot: It took courage and determination to enter "the headquarters of the technological savages who are maintained for colonial repression by the Crown", she wrote.
Now the features and deputy editor of the Sunday Independent, Harris is defender of the market. She offers the logic of the marketplace to all critics of her newspaper. Look at the circulation figures, she says.
She was born Anne O'Sullivan into a middle-class Cork family in 1947. She married Eoghan Harris and has two daughters, one of whom works for the Sunday Independent. Mr Harris is a media consultant and screenwriter who has made a political journey similar to his wife's.
She has worked on the Irish Press and has been a freelance journalist with Hibernia and RTE. She was a fashion writer on the Irish Independent and was the editor of Image magazine before joining the Sunday Independent in 1985 as part of Aengus Fanning's team to change the paper.
Along with Campbell Spray and Willie Kealy, Harris has forged a marketing weapon that has managed to increase the Sunday In dependent's circulation in a shrinking market against increasing competition, especially from British newspapers.
Harris has been crucial, so crucial it is often difficult to see where Sunday Independent features and news begin or where news and opinion separate - it is often difficult to find news at all.
It might have been her understanding of class politics in the past that has allowed her identify with such accuracy the changes in middle-class Ireland and reflect those changes, or at least its - "prejudices and insecurities", as a profile of her in the Phoenix once said.
She lists politics among her interests in Who's Who. Colleagues say that interest can be translated into the office and no one is better at office politics than Ms Harris.