Proinsias De Rossa

Early life and political activity

Born as Francis Ross in 1940 in Dublin, he was educated at Marlborough Street National School and Dublin Institute of Technology. He joined Fianna Eireann at age 12.

Soon after his sixteenth birthday, in May 1956, he joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and was politically active in Sinn Féin from an early age. During the IRA Border Campaign, he was captured while training other IRA members in Glencree in May 1956. He served seven months in Mountjoy Prison and was then interned at the Curragh Camp.

He worked in his family's fruit and vegetable shop, and later was employed as a postman and an encyclopaedia salesman.

Political activities and career

He took the Official Sinn Féin side in the 1970 split. In 1977 he contested his first general election for the party, which that year was renamed Sinn Féin – The Workers' Party (in 1982 the name changed again to the Workers' Party).

He was successful on his third attempt, and was elected at the February 1982 general election as a Sinn Féin – The Workers' Party Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin North-West constituency. He retained his seat until the 2002 general election when he stood down in order to devote more time to his work in the European Parliament.

In 1988, De Rossa succeeded Tomás Mac Giolla as president of the Workers' Party. The party had been growing steadily in the 1980s, and had its best-ever electoral performance in the general and European elections held in 1989. The party won 7 Dáil seats with 5% of the vote. De Rossa himself was elected to the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency, where he topped the poll and the party almost succeeded in replacing Fine Gael as the capital's second-largest party. However, the campaign resulted in a serious build-up of financial debt by the Workers' Party, which threatened to greatly inhibit the party's ability to successfully ensure it would hold on to its gains.

Long-standing tensions within the Workers' Party, pitting reformers, including most of the party's TDs, against hard-liners centred on former general secretary Seán Garland, came to a head in 1992. Disagreements on policy issues were exacerbated by the desire of the reformers to ditch the democratic centralist nature of the party structures, and to remove any remaining questions about alleged party links with the Official IRA, a topic which had been the subject of persistent and embarrassing media coverage. De Rossa called a Special Ardfheis (party conference) to debate changes to the constitution. The motion failed to get the required two-thirds majority, and subsequently De Rossa led the majority of the parliamentary group and councillors out of a meeting of the party's Central Executive Committee the following Saturday at Wynn's Hotel, splitting the party.

De Rossa and the other former Workers' Party members then established a new political party, provisionally called New Agenda. At its founding conference in March 1992, it was named Democratic Left and De Rossa was elected party leader. Later that year he resigned his European Parliament seat, in favour of Democratic Left general secretary Des Geraghty.

Following the collapse of the Fianna Fáil–Labour Party coalition government in 1994, Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left successfully negotiated a government programme for the remaining life of the 27th Dáil, which became known as the 'Rainbow Coalition'. De Rossa became Minister for Social Welfare. He initiated Ireland's first national anti-poverty strategy, a commission on the family, and a commission to examine national pension policy.

The 1997 general election resulted in the defeat of the outgoing coalition. At this point, Democratic Left had accumulated a very significant financial debt. In light of the co-operation achieved in practically all policy areas during the Rainbow Coalition, the party decided to merge with the Labour Party. Labour leader Ruairi Quinn became leader of the unified party; De Rossa took up the symbolic post of party president, which he held until 2002.

In 1999, De Rossa was elected at the European Parliament election for the Dublin constituency. He was re-elected at the 2004 European Parliament election. De Rossa did not contest his Dáil seat at the 2002 general election.

As a member of the European Parliament, De Rossa took a strong pro-integration approach from a distinctly social democratic perspective, as well as a keen interest in foreign policy and social policy. He originally joined the Communist and Allies group before transferring to the PES, and then to the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group.

De Rossa was a member of the European Convention which produced the July 2003 draft European constitution. De Rossa is chair of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council. Moreover, he is a member of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and the Conference of Delegation Chairs. De Rossa is also a substitute member of the Committee on Development and is a substitute on the delegation to the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly. On 16 January 2012, he announced his decision to resign as an MEP, and stepped down on 1 February.

Libel action

During De Rossa's period as leader of Democratic Left, Irish journalist Eamon Dunphy, writing in the Sunday Independent newspaper, published an article alleging that De Rossa was aware, while a member of the Workers' Party, of the Official IRA's alleged illegal activities, including bank robberies and forgery. De Rossa sued the newspaper for libel and was awarded IR£300,000.