Like Seβn ╙ Duibhir a'Ghleanna, Peadar O'Donnell was worsted at the game. On the losing side in the Civil War, Fianna Fβil rode to power on the back of his land annuities agitation.
In 1933, while still a member of the army council, "Red" O'Donnell was assaulted by an IRA-led mob incited by a priest in Leitrim, when he resisted the deportation of the left-wing activist Jim Gralton.
Gralton remarked ungratefully but with a grain of truth: "O'Donnell would like to be the bridegroom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral".
O'Donnell's formative influences included: his mother, a "fervent Larkinite"; his uncle Peter, a member of the "Wobblies" in Butte, Montana; observing the hard life of migrant labourers in Scotland; and Liam Mellows, with whom he shared a cell in Mountjoy during the Civil War.
Mellows was one of four republican prisoners executed in order to deter the IRA from shooting further TDs.
O'Donnell's principled career underlines the marginalisation of the left after the Civil War.
His wife's inherited wealth meant he could devote himself to his political activity and linked writing career. A lesser man would have become a "mΘ fΘiner". After two decades at the centre of Irish revolutionary politics and with De Valera firmly in power, he was reconciled to the State.
During the war he supported neutrality and was appointed as the government's adviser on migratory labour, at £40 a month.
Donal ╙ Drisceoil comments: "His reports throw fascinating light on his apparently unproblematic sharing of the paternalistic, sexist Catholic 'moral policing' approach that dominated Irish church and state attitudes to women".
This rather wooden remark was prompted by Peadar approving of the rosary being recited at a work camp for Irish women in England as a "good influence on the few wild ones".
In the Cold War era, his "transformation from revolutionary to reformist was in line with his communist comrades".
His beloved small-farm countryside became another remnant of history. De Valera once said to O'Donnell: "If you had been in power just as many would have emigrated". Peadar riposted, "but they wouldn't have been the same people".
He founded The Bell magazine with Seβn O'Faolβin and edited it in 1946-54. He was the author of seven novels and one play which evoke community life in the islands and glens of his native Donegal.
The Big Windows (1955) was described in the TLS as "the finest novel written since the war".
O'Donnell saw no contradiction between his politics and friendship with the rich. On the other hand, he recognised Kavanagh as "the man of greatest genius among us". Perhaps Yeats was right. O'Donnell should have concentrated on writing and left politics "for a pastime in old age".
Appropriately, Cork University Press opens its Radical Irish Lives series with a new biography of this "grand old man of the left".
It is a competent work, despite the occasional tendentious lapse and overuse of acronyms.
The author acknowledges the "extraordinary generosity" of Peter Hegarty, O'Donnell's previous biographer, in sharing his research.
Brendan ╙ Cathaoir is an author and an Irish Times journalist. His book Famine Diary appears in paperback next month