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. Soon after his sixteenth birthday, in May 1956, he joined the IRA, and was politically active in Sinn Féin from an early age. During the IRA Border Campaign, he was captured training IRA members in Glencree in May 1956, 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. 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 2002, when he did not contest the general election in order to devote more time to his work in the European parliament.
Read more about this topic: Proinsias De Rossa
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, political and/or activity:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“If I could do my life over, I would try to cleanse at least my pleasures of self-pity.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“My father was a statesman, I’m a political woman. My father was a saint. I’m not.”
—Indira Gandhi (1917–1984)
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)