Early Life
Colley was born in the Dublin suburb of Fairview, the son of Harry and Christina Colley. His father was a veteran of the 1916 Easter Rising and a former adjutant in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who was elected to Dáil Éireann in 1944 as a Fianna Fáil candidate.
He was educated at St. Joseph's Christian Brothers School in Fairview where one of his classmates and closest friends was Charles Haughey, who later became his political arch rival. He studied law at University College Dublin and qualified as a solicitor in the mid-1940s. He remained friends with Haughey after leaving school and, ironically, encouraged him to become a member of Fianna Fáil in 1951. Haughey was elected to Dáil Éireann in the 1957 general election, ousting Colley's father in the process. This put some strain on the relationship between the two young men.
Read more about this topic: George Colley
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“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)
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)