For a nation known for its disproportionate literary heft like Ireland, it is perhaps appropriate that poet Michael D. Higgins, 70, was elected as the Republic's ninth president on Thursday, Oct. 27.

While St. Thomas More is credited as being A Man For All Seasons, Michael D., as he is affectionately known, is also known for many things, not the least of which is for being a class act amongst the so-called "Magnificent Seven," the record number of presidential candidates in this year's race to replace the outgoing Mary McAleese.

Higgins is not only a former Galway West TD and cabinet minister, but a lecturer, peace campaigner and president of Galway United football club.

His speeches in the Dail - now available on YouTube - seem, in a good way, like a throw-back to something from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, including a recent debate over cutting the minimum wage. In an era when saying one is a socialist is akin to political suicide, Higgins wore it proudly, in soundly criticizing a proposal that he saw as attacking the most desperately poor in Irish society.

When he speaks about poverty, he speaks from experience.

Born in Limerick on April 18, 1941, health and work problems forced him and his brother John to be sent to the farm of an unmarried aunt and uncle near Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare.

Higgins later told the Irish Independent that he could only see his parents and two sisters during their monthly visits from Limerick.

"I experienced...the unfolding disintegration of family life due to the poverty and lack of work opportunities of my father over many years," he told the newspaper.

But Higgins' early days were not all a pale imitation of Angela's Ashes. Indeed, he took part in the average life of an Irish boy in the 1940s and 50s, attending nearby Ballycar National School, and later St. Flannan's College in Ennis, County Clare.

A fateful move, however, would make Munster's loss Connaught's gain, when the young Higgins moved to Galway to take up a job as a clerk with the ESB, the electricity company, in Newtownsmyth. He was granted a scholarship to University College Galway (UCG), and took to student life with gusto, becoming the auditor of the literary and debating society, and as president of the Student's Union from 1964 to 1965.

Higgins graduated with a degree in English, sociology and politics. He would later study at the University of Manchester and the University of Indiana. He was the first in his family to access higher education.

He returned to UCG as a junior lecturer, but the political bug was already worming its way into his mind, when he helped organize a strike of junior lecturers in the late 1960s, having broken with Fianna Fail, his original party of choice.

He stood as a Labour Party candidate in 1969, when the party ran under the banner "The 60s Will Be Socialist." Higgins was not successful in his attempt, nor during a subsequent run in 1973. However, the newly-elected Fine Gael Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave appointed Higgins to the Senate.

That very same year, Higgins married actress Sabina Coyne in Dublin. The couple has four children, the eldest, Alice Mary, twins Michael and John, and Daniel, the youngest. Sabina was a founding member of the Focus Theatre and the Stanislavsky Studio in Dublin.

Higgins finally made it in to the Dail Eireann in the June 1981 election, but his fortunes rose and fell during the tumultuous roller-coaster-ride that was Irish politics in the early 1980s. While he was re-elected as the TD for Galway West in the February 1982 general election, he lost his seat just nine months later in November of 1982. Higgins returned to the Dail in 1987, and represented the people of Galway West in every election thereafter until his retirement from party politics in 2011.

The gaps in his political duties were filled by lecturing in political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus, and in the United States at Southern Illinois University. His love of teaching was evident in that he travelled across the rural west of Ireland to provide accessible evening classes to interested citizens. Not surprisingly, he announced during his first month in office that he intended to hold a series of presidential seminars, with the first topic being on youth in Ireland.

While no spring chicken at 70-years-of-age, as his inaugural seminar topic demonstrates, youth issues are of importance to him. In fact, he was a regular columnist for Hot Press magazine - Ireland's version of Rolling Stone - from 1982 to 1992, during which time he sought to become "engaged (with) a young audience in the social issues of the day," according to Higgins' presidential biography on the Irish presidential web site.

Higgins was appointed as Ireland's first Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht in 1993, a position he held until 1997.

"(Higgins) is credited with reviving the Irish film industry and attracting many of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Marlon Brando, Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts to movies being made in Ireland," wrote Brian McDonald in the Irish Independent this past November.

During his time in the cabinets of Taoisigh Albert Reynolds and John Bruton, he also established national Gaelic-language broadcaster Telefis na Gaeilge, now TG4. Higgins also brought about the end of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act which prevented Sinn Fein from the Republic's airwaves.

As though this were not busy enough of a schedule, matters of human rights, peace and democracy, were important to him. He took this message, and tried to bring these ideals, to places as far afield as Nicaragua, Chile, Cambodia, Iraq and Somalia. He also spoke out against the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.