ASKED in a recent interview who had most influenced him, Ruairi Quinn replied, Albert Camus. And his greatest regret? Not learning to read music and play the piano.
The tastes and style of Labour's first Minister for Finance are continental and urbane. He likes rich food, fine wine, snazzy suits, conspicuous ties and, very unusually for an Irishman, let alone an Irish politician, he wears a bracelet.
"His strongest link with socialism these days is his predilection for Havana cigars," a Dail colleague rather cruelly remarked this week.
"He is a populist, not a socialist," says a long time acquaintance. "In fact, he is the quintessential smoked salmon socialist. He is a pragmatist with his heart in the right place, but his pragmatism will always win out over philosophy."
An inquiry as to how he would like to be remembered led to the following response from the Minister: "As a citizen who helped to change Ireland from being an impoverished, confessional State to become a wealthy, compassionate, pluralist republic within an ever stronger European Union."
Married to Liz Allman they have a young son, Conan, and live in Sandymount, in the heart of his Dublin South East constituency. He has two adult children, a boy and a girl, by his first marriage.
There was no flutter on the markets when Quinn became Minister for Finance over two years ago. Why should there be sitting as he does on what is known as the "Fianna Fail wing of the Labour Party"? Besides, his business pedigree is irreproachable.
He is the younger brother of Lochlann Quinn, the millionaire businessman who, on January 1st, took over the chairmanship of the State's largest bank, AIB.
Another brother, Conor, is managing director of the QMP advertising agency, and the fourth eldest male in the Quinn dynasty, Declan, is professor of medicine at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Another brother, Colm, is a doctor. Their cousin, Feargal Quinn is a senator and owner of Superquinn.
Though born in Ranelagh 50 years ago last April, Ruairi Quinn's paternal lineage is Northern and nationalist. His late father, Malachi, was born in Liverpool but spent much of his youth in Newry and fled to the Republic at the end of the 1930s under threat of imprisonment by the British. He and his wife, Julia, joined Feargal Quinn's father to work successfully in the grocery business in Dublin.
The young Quinns got the best their parents could afford. An education at Blackrock College was followed by UCD, where Ruairi studied architecture and embraced student politics with passion. Colleagues of the time recall, with a wry smile, his zealous commitment to the concept of the workers' republic.
After securing an honours degree in architecture, he went to work in Greece for Doxidos, a planning guru in that country.
John Graby of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland remembers Quinn as "a very committed and enthusiastic architect". He worked in mainstream practice with the large Burke Kennedy Doyle firm but, eventually, national politics would prove an irresistible lure.
He was 31 years old in 1977 when first elected to the Dail's Labour benches but, four years later, suffered the loss of that seat. He had to wait only until February 1982 to win it back and ensured that he never lost it again. In fact, by November that year, he was topping the poll in Dublin South East and now probably holds the safest Labour seat in the State.
In coalition with Fianna Fail, he was the Labour TD awarded the most senior economic brief, Enterprise and Employment, a kind of political hors d'oeuvre for what awaited him in the rainbow alliance. This Department was an amalgam of two former government departments, Industry and Commerce and Labour, and, according to sources in the business sector, he "turned it on its head".
The most significant change in his reign was the enactment of the so called Culliton agenda; to break up the old IDA into IDA Ireland, dealing solely with foreign industrial investment; Forbairt, addressing the needs of indigenous industry; and Forfas, the overall agency advising on industrial policy.
Frank Mulcahy of ISME, the small businesses' representative body, says Quinn decided that senior civil servants should sit down on a weekly basis for what became known as the Thursday breakfast with all sectors of industry and enterprise.
"I am not talking about civil servants meeting the captains of industry but with ordinary, struggling owner managers. He came and spoke intelligently to us.
"Until then, civil servants only met professional managers who were not risk take Ruairi Quinn drag Enterprise and Employment into the 21st, let alone the 20th century."
Great, then, were the shockwaves among small enterprises when he proposed legislation which would remove their protection from predatory takeovers by cash rich big business.
"It was very much at variance with his stated philosophy of supporting egalitarianism and with having no interest in protecting firms in a dominant position" says Frank Mulcahy.
The Bill was vehemently opposed by small businesses, and eventually a team of experts was put together to review the legislation.
Although Ruairi Quinn was comfortable in coalition with Fianna Fail, it is ironic that he will be long remembered for his chilling comment to Albert Reynolds as the alliance was falling apart.
"We've come for a head. Yours or Harry's [Whelehan], and we are not going to get Harry's."
In spite of the trauma of that break up, Quinn and Bertie Ahern remained friendly. It is widely believed they would sit easily together in coalition again.
Friends praise Quinn's generosity and wit but warn of his short fuse temper. He is "surprised and taken aback" by criticism, says one, and indeed he reacted extremely angrily recently during media reportage of business payments to politicians. He taunted reporters in the Dail to come down and try to do the politicians' job themselves.
Wednesday, of course, will be his hour of triumph as Minister for Finance. There is not a hint now of the audacious young socialist who stirred the pot of student politics three decades ago.