For more than 40 years, Michael D Higgins has been one of the most forceful left-wing voices in Irish life.
Described on his own website as a campaigner, poet, politician, his social concern grew, he once said, from a Limerick childhood.
His father struggled with poverty and ill health and he and his brother being sent to live - fractured lives - with an aunt and uncle in Newmarket-on-Fergus in Co Clare. Playwright Sean O'Casey also influenced his early political thinking.
Mr Higgins is well known for his academic background having studied at St Flannan's College Ennis, University College Galway (now NUI Galway), Indiana University and Manchester University.
His political ambitions were obvious early on as he was President of the UCG Students' Union in 1964/65.
However before he became a career politician he worked as Statutory Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at UCG and Visiting Professor at the Southern Illinois University.
He was a Labour candidate in the 1969 and 1973 general elections but was unsuccessful on both occasions.
Mr Higgins' first Oireachtas position finally came when Fine Gael Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave appointed him to the 13th Seanad in 1973.
He was elected to the Dáil as a TD for Galway West in the 1981 general election and kept his seat in the subsequent election on February 1982.
However he lost his seat in the poll of November 1982 and spent five years out of the Dáil Chamber.
He regained a place in the Seanad, however, as a member of the NUI Maynooth panel and also served two terms as Mayor of Galway (1982-1983 and 1991-1992).
Higgins returned to the Dáil after the 1987 general election and built on his reputation as a leading campaigner for social justice and civil rights at home and abroad.
He sought international support for liberation movements across the globe, as well as highlighting the horrors of famine and death in Africa.
In 1993 he joined the Cabinet as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.
Some of his major acts with the portfolio saw the abolition of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, the re-establishment of the Irish Film Board and the creation of Teilifís na Gaeilge (now TG4).
Mr Higgins succeeded Proinsias De Rossa as President of the Labour Party in 2003, while continuing as the party's Spokesman on Foreign Affairs.
The Galway West TD wanted to run against Mary McAleese in 2004 but Labour decided against it and Mrs McAleese was elected unopposed for second term as President.
He did not contest his seat in the 2011 general election in order to free himself up for a run for the Áras and ultimately won the Labour nomination this summer.
The now 70-year-old poet-politicians threw himself into the campaign with the same kind of gusto he showed in the heady days of the 1960s.
After a gruelling campaign, he was finally declared the winner of the Presidential race after obtaining over 700,000 first preference votes and more than 1m votes in total.
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