Terry Prone: Eamon Ryan will leave politics without rancour or regret

Eamon Ryan is a reader. A thinker. A questioner. He lives modestly and is embedded in family. He’s genuinely interested in other people

Eamon Ryan will be off to one of the Aran Islands for their usual simple family summer holiday without a worry for the run-up to the general election. Picture: Stephen Collins/Collins 

It might be three decades ago. Or more. It was certainly in the last century, when the then leader of the Green Party brought me to a hotel conference room to give media training to members and potential candidates, one of them Eamon Ryan. 

The Greens, right across Europe, were doing well. In Ireland, they were doing well, too, perhaps for the wrong reasons. One of those wrong reasons was that their Unique Selling Point, the factor that allowed unaffiliated voters to give them a second and third preference, was that they weren’t viewed as real politicians at all.