He looks and sounds like a Fine Gael grandee, and his politics matches that profile, at least on Northern Ireland. He might be a bit too liberal on most other matters for Fine Gael.

But nothing about him conveys a whiff of Fianna Fail. He even went to a Fine Gaelish school, Belvedere. But he was Fianna Fail all his adult life until he was appointed to the judiciary in 1979.

He was born in 1928. His father was a civil servant and represented Ireland at the World Economic Conference in Geneva in 1930. There he contracted pneumonia and died, leaving his wife to rear five children, of whom Donal was the youngest.

She qualified as a health inspector and until her retirement worked for Dublin Corporation. After Belvedere, he went to UCD on a scholarship, where he did law, politics and economics.

He doesn't know why he decided to become a barrister; it came to him one day walking through Tolka Park. He was called to the Bar in 1951 and to the Inner Bar (i.e. he became a senior counsel) in 1968.

He was appointed to the High Court in 1979, to the European Court of First Instance in 1989 and to the Supreme Court here in 1996. He retired from the Supreme Court last year on reaching the age of 72.

As a barrister he was involved in most of the major constitutional cases of the 1960s and 1970s. He acted for Mairin de Burca in her case on juries, for Mrs McGee in hers on contraception, for Kathleen Byrne in hers on the right to sue the State and he advised David Norris who was challenging the constitutionality of the laws criminalising homosexual acts.

He was briefly a member of the Lab our Party but was always inclined towards Fianna Fail, simply because his brother, Tom Barrington (a distinguished civil servant), brought the Irish Press into the house on a daily basis.

In the 1950s he was involved in Tuairim, a "think tank" association, and through it published a pamphlet on Northern Ireland in which he criticised anti-partitionism and argued that Ireland could be united only with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. In that pamphlet, he also argued for an interim settlement based on civil rights.

This was a decade before the Lemass-O'Neill meetings and 14 years before any party adopted this as its policy. He publicly criticised the Catholic Church in the 1950s over the boycott of Protestants in Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford.

He married Eileen O'Donovan and they have four children: Eileen is a barrister, Kathleen is a journalist; Kevin is a copywriter with McConnells advertising; and Brian is also a barrister and legal adviser to Seamus Mallon.