The summons to high office seems often to come to John Murray when he is abroad. He was on holiday in France with his wife and two young children in 1982 when the attorney general, Patrick Connolly, resigned in dramatic circumstances. John Murray, then 38 and only recently called to the Inner Bar, was asked to come home to take up the position.
Earlier this week he received a call in Luxembourg, where he is a member of the EC Court of Justice, asking him to come home to serve on the Supreme Court.
His tenure as AG in 1982 was brief, as the government fell in December of that year. But when Fianna Fail came back to power in 1987 he was again asked by Charles Haughey to take the position, and was renominated when that government was succeeded by the Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats coalition of 1989.
He comes from a middle-class Limerick family with Fianna Fail connections. His father was a civil servant and later a builder, and his mother a teacher, though she had to give up her job on marriage.
However, she had strong political views, and according to his brother, Eugene, a senior executive in RTE, she had radical views on the role of women. Political discussion was lively in the Murray household.
The eldest of four sons, John Murray grew up in a family which remains close. His brother, Michael, is State Solicitor in Limerick and another brother, Hugh, is an architect of the firm Murray O'Leary.
All four brothers still holiday in Clare together every year with their families, and each day they swim together in the sea before breakfast. John Murray was active in student affairs and was twice president of the Union of Students in Ireland. This interest in politics continued when he qualified as a barrister in 1967, and in the early 1970s he contested the local elections for Fianna Fail in Dun Laoghaire, but failed to be elected.
As a young barrister he represented Neil Blaney in the Arms Trial. In another high-profile case, he helped to prosecute Britain before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for the brutal treatment of detainees.
In 1969 he married Gabrielle Walsh, daughter of Supreme Court judge Brian Walsh. They have a daughter and a son.
Throughout the 1970s he built a successful career in commercial, civil and constitutional law until Mr Haughey plucked him from the Law Library in 1982 to serve as attorney general, an appointment seen at the time as a move away from the old guard.
Although of a different generation from most ministers in that and the subsequent Fianna Fail government, and not intimate with them, he is said to have been proud to have served in government as the highest law officer in the State.
One of his first tasks as attorney general was to draft the amendment to the Constitution which guarantees the right to life of the unborn, equal to that of the mother, and which was put to referendum the following year. It is an irony that he will now sit on a court which has interpreted that amendment as giving the right to abortion where the mother is suicidal.
Perhaps as a result of his role in drafting the amendment - though that was his instruction from the government - he is associated in the minds of many of his colleagues with strong views on the right to life of the unborn.
Some recall his address to the Supreme Court when he was reappointed in 1987, where he drew specific attention to the common link between all the institutions of the State in their obligation to defend the rights of the individual and the unborn.
However, it has also been suggested that in this he was doing no more than stressing the common duties of the attorney general, the government and the Supreme Court under the Constitution. He has not spoken publicly on the abortion issue, though he is thought to share the views of his father-in-law, who was strongly opposed.
His second term as Attorney General also had its moments of controversy. He refused to grant the extradition to Britain of Father Patrick Ryan on explosives charges because of the prejudicial nature of the publicity about the case in the British media. And he set the scale of fees for counsel in the beef tribunal.
He was noted for his disciplined running of the AG's office.
He went straight from the AG job to the Court of Justice in 1991, and was reappointed to the court in 1997.
The business of the court is conducted in French, which he speaks well. He is also a professor at the University of Louvain and was in Aix-en-Provence this week, giving a course on human rights law with special reference to discriminatory practices.
This area features strongly in the Court of Justice, which has delivered a large number of judgments relating to indirect discrimination against women, especially in areas where legislation bears particularly heavily upon them because of their child-bearing role. One of the cases at which he presided gave equal promotion rights to part-time workers, who are disproportionately female.
His appointment strengthens the European experience on the Supreme Court, which will soon lose that of Mr Justice Barrington, who is due to retire this year. Those close to him point out that, while happy in Luxembourg, he misses his family and friends, and his former hobby of sailing in Dublin Bay, which he would hope now to resume.
