From ardent republican to defender of EU

Proinsias De Rossa is trimmer (hill-walking in Wicklow and around Brussels), more relaxed and less abrasive. The stutter is still there but he is unfazed by it. He seems all made-over again, as he was in the posters pasted all over Dublin in 1989.

He will be 61 on May 15th. He does not want to talk about his private life or about his three children, all of whom are adults.

He lost his religious faith when he was in his 20s. He thinks he was in bed at the time and has never looked for it since.

Asked who he has admired, he mentions immediately Noel Browne who, he says, had an "enormous influence" on him.

He has to be prompted to say that he admired Cathal Goulding, the late and former chief-of-staff of the Official IRA, who was instrumental in moving the then republican movement in a Marxist direction in the 1960s. He then says that he admired Sean Garland and Tomas Mac Giolla, other former comrades in the republican movement.

De Rossa joined the republican movement when he was 16. He joined the youth wing, Fianna Eireann, and joined the IRA quickly afterwards. He was interned in the Curragh in the late 1950s. He left the IRA when he was released from the Curragh in 1960, but remained part of its political wing, Sinn Fein, Sinn Fein the Workers' Party and the Workers' Party, until 1992.

He was elected to the Dail in 1982 and became president of the Workers' Party. He led the breakaway from the Workers' Party in 1992 to form Democratic Left, of which he was leader until it amalgamated with the Labour Party in 1999.

Unprompted, he mentions others that he has admired; Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton - "not just for his role in Northern Ireland but because of his intellect, his capacity to grasp complex issues even when the issues were alien to him".

Asked who else he admires, he says after a long pause: "Can't think of anybody else this minute. . . I'm sure if I sat down overnight. . . oh yes, Ruairi Quinn. You were waiting for me not to mention him."

He talks supportively of Mr Quinn and how, although they had disagreements, he admired him as minister for finance from 1994 to 1997.

He understands why Mr Quinn has to be vague about coalition options after the next election but says he himself is entirely opposed to any involvement with Fianna Fail and believes there is no prospect of that.

The interview took place in Mr Quinn's modern office in the new wing of Leinster House. No portraits of Marx or Lenin on the walls, none even of Ho Chi Ming (Mr Quinn used to be known in his radical student days as Ho Chi Quinn, partly because of a resemblance to the bald leader of North Vietnam during the war with the US).

He speaks enthusiastically about his role as member of the European Parliament (elected to it in June 1999) and talks animatedly about how the parliament forced a change in the directive on junior hospital doctors' working hours.

Yes, he admits it is a far cry from changing the structure of society but it is a measure of how effective the parliament could be.

Generally he is defensive about the EU. He acknowledges that this represents a radical shift in his stance, having been opposed to Ireland joining in the first place, and then opposed to every single treaty since then until the Amsterdam Treaty. That treaty, which he played a part in drafting, added a social dimension to the EU for the first time, he says.

Even on what some insist is the emerging European army, otherwise known as the Rapid Reaction Force, he is defensive. He asks rhetorically "when is an army not an army?" and when it is suggested to him that he might be an expert on that question, he laughs heartily.

He says the issue is not whether a European army or Rapid Reaction Force would infringe our neutrality but whether it would operate within the structures of the UN and whether depleted uranium weapons would be used, for instance.

He is also defensive on the democratic deficit issue. He denies that the powerhouse of the EU, the Council of Ministers, is unaccountable because each of the ministers has been elected to their own parliaments.

He dismisses the point that they cannot be accountable to those parliaments or their electorates because nobody knows how individuals ministers voted in the council - the crucial point, he says, is the lack of interest on the part of national parliaments in what happens in Europe.

He is now in favour of a European federation, with a strong social dimension, not just a loose confederation of European states.