The election of Mary Robinson was partly organised by a group of former Maoists, outgoing Labour Party leader Mr Ruairí Quinn said yesterday.
In an interview with Radio 1's Marian Finucane covering his life and times, Mr Quinn referred to the re-emergence of a group of radical Maoists during the 1990 presidential campaign.
He said it was a "bizarre experience" that in his position of director of elections during the campaign he met "very well-placed and highly successful business executives who in a previous life had been very radical Maoists of one type or another, and who all came on board to help", he said.
He had associated with this Trinity College-based group when he was a student at UCD, he said.
At the time he had close friends who were Maoists and, while he never joined their ranks, there was a lot of co-operation between them.
The individuals he referred to would in some cases be well known to the general public, he explained.
"They may not have maintained the same level of commitment but the value system is still there," he said. "They hadn't lost it and they still haven't lost it."
Earlier, Mr Quinn had said his Ho Chi Quinn nickname was a reference to the Vietnamese War.
During the interview, Mr Quinn also elaborated on a controversial comment he made some years ago about "post-catholic Ireland".
"It was never meant to cause offence," he said. His argument had been that significant change had occurred in the relationship between church and State "and, to that extent, Ireland was now post-catholic in a political context".
"I apologised privately to people who wrote to me at the time and I want to clarify that point now," he said.
He said he was not a believer in the Catholic religion. "I think every young adult has to confront the set of beliefs you inherit and see whether they fit with you and are they things you can carry with you through your adult life," he said. "If they don't fit with you, I think there is an obligation to construct for yourself an alternative set of beliefs."
Mr Quinn, a qualified architect, also said his one major failure in politics was not convincing sufficient numbers of colleagues to think further ahead in terms of planning.
"To convince somebody to do something because it is 20 years down the road is difficult because it is not a time-frame that catches the imagination," he said, after criticising the implementation of the Bacon report and the government's record on housing.
He said his decision to stand down as leader of the Labour Party in October had been partly prompted by the feeling that there were other things, outside of politics, that he wanted to do.