THE Minister for Social Welfare, Mr De Rossa, told a jury yesterday that as a teenager he had failed to get an apprenticeship as an electrician with the ESB.
Mr De Rossa began giving his evidence in late afternoon yesterday and will continue today.
He told the court that he was one of a family of 12. Mr De Rossa was born in Dublin's north inner city in 1940.
At the time of his birth, his father was a farm labourer and his mother ran a small greengrocer's shop, he said. The family lived in Parnell Street over the shop.
From the time he was six or seven, one of his tasks after school and at weekends was to make deliveries to local houses, mostly in tenements.
"We helped in various ways at various times depending on our age," he said. Initially his father was a farm labourer in north County Dublin but he then got a job with JJ Lighffoot's in Little Mary Street, delivering farm produce.
The Minister said that around the time of his birth his father would have driven a horse and cart but he got a truck four or five years later. Mr De Rossa said he came around the middle in the family and was "the baby of the older group and the eldest of the younger group".
He went to school in nearby Marlborough Street "just up the road" at Scoil Colmcille which was an All-Irish school. He went to this school from the infants class until he was 12 years old. It was a "smallish school" within the model schools in Marlborough Street opposite the Pro-Cathedral.
There was a "very nationalistic view" in the school, said Mr De Rossa. "There were constant references to 1916 and to the fact that while in 1921 part of the country had been freed, there were still six counties which had not been freed."
Asked about his parents' political views, Mr De Rossa told his counsel, Mr Paul O'Higgins SC, that from the age of 10 or 12 he realised that his mother was "a rabid supporter of De Valera's" and his father had been an admirer of Michael Collins.
He said his parents did not actually discuss that kind of politics in front of their children and he suspected this was because they had grown up and got married in the early part of the century and did not want to carry on that division.
The plaintiff said that when he left national school at the age of 12 in 1952 he had gone briefly to the technical school in Capel Street and then to the technical school in Kevin Street because he wanted to get an apprenticeship as an electrician.
He told his counsel that there was very little prospect of that at a time when there were more people leaving the country than there were jobs available.