Looking For Richard
Newly-elected United Left Alliance TD Richard Boyd Barrett has long been one of the Irish left’s most articulate voices. Now, with public anger at Ireland’s political and economic situation at an all-time high, he’s in Dáil Éireann waging an unrelenting war against cronyist capitalism....
Olaf Tyaransen, 20 Apr 2011
Richard Boyd Barrett isn’t exactly the sharpest of dressers. Proudly so. Despite the fact that he’ll be speaking in the House soon after this interview, the boyishly handsome 43-year-old arrives into Buswell’s Hotel wearing faded black jeans, a woollen cardigan and a flannel check shirt. He looks more like a trendy college lecturer than a Dáil representative.
When he was elected as TD for Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown in February, the People Before Profit Alliance candidate told journalists that he didn’t actually own a suit. That much hasn’t changed. “I still don’t,” he laughingly tells Hot Press comments on his casual attire.
Not that there’s anything casual about his demeanour. He’s carrying a stack of files under his arm and freely admits to being “quite stressed at the moment.” He’s speaking in the chambers later, he’s still sorting his offices and staff out, there are various meetings to attend, and... well, basically it’s all go.
Of course, it’s been all-go for RBB for years now. Regarded by some as the poster boy of the Irish Left, he has been publicly campaigning on numerous issues since the mid-90s, including political corruption, the Iraq war, Shell To Sea, privatisation, NAMA, renewable energy, generic medicines, the Rossport Five, genetically engineered food, Afghanistan...
Regularly quoted in the press and a frequent talking head on TV and in radio discussions, Richard hit the international headlines in 2007 when, in the middle of a general election campaign, the Sunday Independent revealed that he had been reunited with his birth mother, actress Sinéad Cusack. This made Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons his stepfather (“We often discuss what we should call each other. We haven’t quite put a label on it, but we get on well”).
Even more strangely, a few years before that, a tabloid had revealed that his younger brother, Douglas, was actually the son of disgraced priest Fr. Michael Cleary and his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton. Both boys had been adopted as infants by David and Valerie Boyd Barrett – with whom RBB still lives in Glenageary.
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