THE RABBLE-ROUSER WHO CAN’T SHAKE THAT ‘CHAMPAGNE SOCIALIST’ STIGMA
WATER has been the single defining political issue of Paul Murphy’s career thus far.
Back in 2014, Murphy’s career was in the doldrums after he failed to retain the European Parliament seat he had inherited from veteran socialist Joe Higgins.
Having gained the seat midterm from Higgins without an election, Murphy performed poorly at the polls when he tried to retain it, finishing in sixth place with 20,000 less votes than Higgins had gained five years earlier.
Murphy was mocked by many, who suggested he was a fraud, having been raised in the welloff south Dublin suburb of Goatstown.
Depicted as the private school boy turned wannabe working class hero, Murphy’s career seemed stagnant until opposition to water charges began to grow.
By outflanking Sinn Féin in the sheer bloody-mindedness of their opposition to charges, Murphy managed to win a surprise seat for the Anti-Austerity Alliance (AAA) in the 2014 Dublin South-West by-election.
While Sinn Féin had been expected to easily win that contest, its brief flirtation with paying the charges allowed the AAA to outwit it on the hard left, in a win that showed water was an issue that could win seats.
Confident that he had now struck upon a winning formula, Murphy vowed in his Dáil maiden speech never to waiver on water charges.
It was this conviction that brought him to the demonstration in Jobstown on November 14, 2014, during which a car transporting then-tánaiste, Joan Burton and special advisor, Karen O’Connell was circled by demonstrators and stuck there for up to three hours.
Murphy himself became the focus, using a loudhailer to ask the crowd: ‘If they [gardaí] withdraw the Public Order Unit, do we agree to let her go?’
While yesterday’s verdict cements his position as the defacto leader of the hard left, his critics won’t let him forget that his upbringing was middle-class, peppered with trips abroad and a private education.
Murphy has made no secret of his privileged beginnings. In an interview with the Irish Daily Mail after he was first elected as a TD he admitted: ‘I’ve been told I’m a champagne socialist all my life.’
He grew up in the south Dublin suburb of Goatstown. At the age of 10, he and his two siblings lost their father Kieran and were raised by his mother, a retired teacher.
Before his death, Kieran Murphy was CEO of Mars Ireland and the family were left comfortably off. His son received his secondary education from fee-paying, St Killian’s on the Roebuck Road. In fifth year, he left St Killian’s for the Institute of Education on Leeson Street, where he felt he would be best placed to get the points he needed to study law. It was during this time that his political views were shaped.
‘I’m sure my mother thought it was just a phase I was going through,’ he remarked
‘But once I attended my first protest when I was 15, I knew I wanted to be an activist.’
The summer before beginning his studies in UCD, Murphy joined the Socialist Party and helped build-up its youth branch.
He involved himself in Youth Against War, the group which brought 100,000 people on to the streets in February 2003 to protest against Iraq.
With his political interests piqued, Murphy’s desire for a career in law dissipated, even though he got his degree.
‘I just found law kind of tedious to be honest... My vision was to become a full-time campaigner and I knew from the moment I decided to leave law behind that I was never going to be well-off.’
Murphy’s brush with the law over the Jobstown protest was not his first. He has been arrested before for his roles in various demonstrations and spent a week in an Israeli prison after he attempted to sail to Gaza on a flotilla.
The TD – who lives in Tallaght where he shares a home with his wife – prides himself on taking home a modest salary.
As an MEP he earned over €6,000 a month. He took €1,700 from that, just above the minimum wage, to live on and donated the rest.
‘Mother thought it was a phase’