Mt Justice Hugh O'Flaherty is one of the few judges to be appointed straight to the Supreme Court from the Bar. A highly successful barrister, he took a significant drop in income of about £100,000 a year when he was appointed in 1990, at the age of 52. He became its youngest member.
In his career as a barrister he did a lot of work for the State, but also represented the McGimpsey brothers in their constitutional challenge to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and briefly represented SPUC in its action against student unions on abortion information.
From Cahirciveen in Co Kerry, he attended the Christian Brothers primary school, followed by St Brendan's College in Killarney before going to UCD and the King's Inns. He was called to the Bar in 1959, and became a senior counsel in 1976, at the time the youngest member of the Inner Bar.
At that time he had close Fianna Fail connections and the then Taoiseach, Mr Jack Lynch, attended his call to the Inner Bar. He assisted in the writing of speeches for the subsequent leader of Fianna Fail, Mr Haughey.
He worked as a sub-editor with the Irish Press and as a lecturer in law as well as working at the Bar in the early years of his career. His journalism may well have informed his commitment to freedom of the press, on which he has spoken and written widely.
One of his first challenges as a Supreme Court judge was the X case, where he ruled that abortion was justified when the mother's life was in danger, even if it was not imminent. Three years later, in the Ward of Court case, the family of a woman who had been in a coma for more than 20 years sought to discontinue direct intervention in keeping her alive.
Here he ruled that "nature should take its course", without artificially preserving a life without purpose, meaning or dignity. The majority of the court agreed.
He is criticised in some legal circles for being too pragmatic and result-oriented. "In the Ward of Court case the judgment was tailored to meet the compassion of the circumstances - `what would the family want?' and work back from that. He is very pragmatic, and that tends to offend the legal purists," said a senior legal source.
"His strong point is that he does not believe in sentencing as vengeance, which a lot of the public and people in the media seem to," this source said. "Most of legal opinion would be that when someone does not set out to commit a crime, and does something in a moment of madness, and is basically a good person and wants to make amends, they should not face a heavy sentence. When he gets into trouble in the Court of Criminal Appeal it's because of that.
"O'Flaherty would be the first person to give a person from a deprived background a chance, and he does that in the Court of Criminal Appeal. He is a very kind, compassionate man."
Mr Justice O'Flaherty is married to Sligo-born Kathleen and has four children, one of whom has a law degree. He lives in Ballsbridge and has a family home in Cahirciveen.