A flamboyant European social democrat who used power well and took pleasure in it, Ruairí Quinn did not fulfil his ambition as Labour leader, reports Mark Brennock, Political Correspondent.
Throughout his 38-year career in the Labour Party, Ruairí Quinn's attitude to power has been unambiguous: politicians need to be in power, he has said regularly, adding that he personally enjoys power.
But since his election as Labour Party leader in 1997, many close to him have speculated that his ambition may have been modified. Sure, he would have loved to enter government after June's general election, but this would not be enough. After all, his predecessor, Mr Dick Spring, had enjoyed a tremendous period of power and influence, and had ended bitter divisions in Labour. But he had also left the party, electorally, in as bad a condition as he had found it.
Mr Quinn wanted to leave behind a stronger party than he had inherited. But he has neither led them to power, nor left them electorally stronger - apart from the effect of the merger with Democratic Left.
His critics argue that his failure to join an alternative government platform with Fine Gael was a miscalculation. Deprived of the chance to change the Government, many people voted to change the Opposition, they maintain. Labour's measured election message failed to attract the significant number of anti-Government voters, who instead supported the Green Party, Sinn Féin and Independents.
Mr Quinn's supporters say they had no alternative. Ruling out coalition with Fianna Fáil, thus binding themselves to a deeply unpopular Fine Gael, would have damaged them further, they argue. Their electoral strategy, they say, was forced on them by circumstances. In addition, it was approved overwhelmingly at a Labour Party conference before the election.
Mr Quinn tried to put a positive gloss on Labour's election result yesterday, but coming back with the same number of seats he entered the campaign with was probably his greatest political disappointment.
He spent five bruising years as an Opposition leader with little to show for it. Yesterday, he said frankly that he might not have the energy to give the job the same level of commitment for the next six years. He would stay in politics and had no plans to do anything else, he said.
Ruairí Quinn has been a Labour Party member for 38 years, but did not come to the party through the traditional trade union route. There has always been some muttering among Labour's members about Mr Quinn's attachment to power and his willingness to deal with, what for many Labour people was the traditional enemy, Fianna Fáil.
His liking of good wine, fine cigars, contemporary Irish art and other "bourgeois" trappings were commented upon as marking him out from the traditional Labour Party image.
Much of this was unfair. He is a genuine democratic socialist or social democrat (the preferred epithet within the party changes with fashion) and could never see himself in any other party. His natural ideological home is among the left of centre social democratic parties of western Europe who have held or shared power in their respective states for many years since the second World War.
When he said, on the day of his election as party leader, that it was the achievement of "a lifetime's political ambition . . . a dream come true", he meant it.
His political consciousness was formed during student protests in UCD in the late 1960s. He has always had a penchant for the flamboyant gesture and image: the light-coloured suit in the Dáil chamber's sea of grey, navy and black; the loud tie; the campaign car blasting Manfred Mann's The Mighty Quinn at election time; the red roses.
He comes from a Ranelagh-born, Sandymount-bred family of achievers. One brother, Lochlann, is a successful businessman and chairman of AIB. Another, Conor, is managing director of the QMP advertising agency. Another brother, Declan, is professor of medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, while another, Colm, is a doctor. His cousin, Feargal, is a senator and owner of Superquinn.
He was educated at Blackrock College and UCD, where he quickly became involved in the political activism that swept European campuses in the 1960s, but he was regarded as a moderate by many of his fellow activists.
His activism spread outside UCD into the housing action committees that were active at the time, and he campaigned for the opening of Merrion Square to the public.
"It seemed to everyone that he would end up in politics," says one fellow student activist from that time.
On his return from post-graduate study in Athens, he began working as an architect and, at the same time, began building up the depleted Labour organisation in Dublin South East and his own position within it. The depletion was due to the fact that many in Dr Noel Browne's 1969 organisation had been expelled from the party or had resigned after the party's bitter coalition conference.
When the selection convention for the 1973 general election took place, Dr Browne stood down and Mr Quinn took the nomination. In the subsequent general election, he was just 39 votes short of a Dáil seat, despite a collapse in Labour's vote from 24 per cent to 11 per cent.
He held the nomination, despite opposition from a lively left within the constituency which eventually dissipated. Mr Quinn's election to Dublin Corporation in 1974, and nomination to the Seanad in 1976, gave him the base from which he finally won the seat in 1977 by 250 votes.
He lost the seat briefly in 1981 and scraped back on the 11th count in February 1982. He has held it comfortably at every election since, although he had only a narrow margin over Fine Gael's Frances Fitzgerald in June.
In November 1982, the new Tánaiste and Labour leader, Mr Dick Spring, picked Mr Quinn to be his junior minister in the Department of the Environment. As an architect, Mr Quinn had written considerably on the social problems of urban growth in Ireland and the area suited his interests.
However, when Frank Cluskey resigned from cabinet in late 1983 and Mr Spring decided to move to another department, it was to Labour, and not Environment that Mr Quinn was appointed as a minister.
In coalition with Fianna Fáil from 1992, he was the Labour TD given the most senior economic brief, Enterprise and Employment. But this turned out to be only a warm-up for his appointment as minister for finance in the rainbow government.
It was during the crisis that led to the collapse of the coalition with Fianna Fáil and the formation of the rainbow government that Mr Quinn uttered his most quoted political phrase. Walking into a meeting with then Taoiseach Mr Albert Reynolds, he said: "We have come for a head, yours or Harry's. It does not appear we are getting Harry's."
However, Mr Quinn was seen as much less hostile to continuing in government with Fianna Fáil than were many of his colleagues.
Labour's achievement during Mr Quinn's time in Finance was to show that it could handle the government's most senior ministry. With Mr Quinn, this came as no surprise: his pragmatism and commitment to being in government ensured there was no major loosening of the purse strings and no run on the pound.
As chairman of the European Council of Economic Ministers, during Ireland's EU presidency, he steered through crucial agreements to lay the foundations for the single currency.
He said yesterday that when Mr Spring became party leader, he thought his chance of the top job was gone.
However, it came again in 1997 when Mr Quinn defeated Mr Brendan Howlin, now his deputy leader. He had a good first year, steering through the merger with Democratic Left and winning by-elections in Limerick East and Dublin North.
He adopted a very different style from his predecessor. His kitchen cabinet was dominated by deputies such as Mr Howlin, Mr Derek McDowell and Mr Emmet Stagg, rather than the outside advisers who were much resented during Mr Spring's time.
But with Sinn Féin moving closer to mainstream politics and the Green Party attracting more support, he struggled to establish Labour as a clear voice for change.
During the biggest economic boom in Irish history, as Mr Quinn said yesterday: "We seem to have failed to convince people that you cannot have your cake and eat it. You cannot have such low tax rates and still have the public services we require".