Richard Boyd-Barrett first ran for the Dáil in 2002 under the Socialist Worker banner when he picked up 872 first preference votes.
Five years later, as a People Before Profit candidate, he got 5,233 votes and only lost out in the end to the Green Party’s Ciarán Cuffe for the last seat, although it was by a couple of thousand votes.
His breakthrough came in 2011 when he stayed in the race at the expense of Ivana Bacik by 147 votes and went on to win a seat.
A prominent anti-war campaigner he is also a vociferous critic of Government economic policy. The 57-year-old went to St Michael’s College and then UCD, where he earned an MA in English literature.
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In 2015, he spoke in the Dáil about the death of his infant daughter Ella 13 years earlier who had a fatal foetal abnormality.
