Ruairí Brugha (; 15 October 1917 – 31 January 2006) was an Irish Republican and IRA volunteer who served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Ireland from 1977 to 1979, Senator for the Industrial and Commercial Panel from 1969 to 1973 and 1977 to 1981 and a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin County South constituency from 1973 to 1977. Family and early life He was born in Dublin in 1917. He was the son of Cathal Brugha, who was Minister for Defence in the first Dáil and was killed in 1922, during the Civil War; his mother Caitlín Brugha (née Kingston) was an anti-Treaty TD from 1923 to 1927. The family home, a refuge for republicans, was often raided by the successive authorities whom the Brughas opposed: first the Royal Irish Constabulary, then British soldiers and Auxiliaries, followed by the forces of the Irish Free State. Brugha was educated at Rockwell College and in Coláiste Mhuire, and joined the IRA at the age of 16. When IRA members were interned at the outbreak of World War II, he went on the run. He was eventually arrested in 1940, and interned at the Curragh for the duration of The Emergency. While on parole for health reasons he met Máire MacSwiney, the only child of Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney who died while on hunger strike in 1920, and they married in Cork in July 1945. Brugha then joined the business which his mother had established, the menswear shop Kingstons Ltd, eventually becoming managing director. Political career Released from detention, he began to rethink his relationship with republicanism. Talking in 1968, to Tim Pat Coogan for his book The IRA, Brugha described his eventual rejection of the IRA's doctrine of the continued legitimacy of the second Dáil, saying: "We became the victims of an illusion that could never become a reality" and that "it was obvious to me that the 26 counties were politically free and that the sort of activity in which the IRA had been engaged had not helped to end Partition." Ruairí and Máire both joined Clann na Poblachta shortly after its foundation in 1946, and at the 1948 general election, he stood in the Waterford constituency which his mother had represented in the 1920s. However, the election was a disappointment for the new party, which won only ten seats, and with less than