Background
Ó Caoláin was born in Monaghan in 1953.
Ó Caoláin was born in Monaghan in 1953.
He was educated at Saint Mary"s Columbia Broadcasting System, Monaghan.
He has been a Teachta Dála (Territorial Decoration) for the Cavan–Monaghan constituency since 1997 and was the parliamentary leader of Sinn Féin in Dáil Éireann from 1997 to 2011. He was a bank official with the Bank of Ireland in the 1970s, and worked in a number of towns, including Ballinasloe. He became a senior bank official but then left the bank to concentrate on politics.
Ó Caoláin underwent successful cardiac surgery early in 2007.
On 19 June 2007 it was reported that he was rushed to hospital, but he was released shortly thereafter and has since made a full recovery. He has been active in republican circles for since the 1970s.
He was Director of Elections in the Anti H-Block campaign of 1981 when Kieran Doherty was elected as a Territorial Decoration for the Cavan–Monaghan constituency. Between 1982 and 1985 he was general manager of the republican newspaper An Phoblacht.
In 1989, loyalist paramilitaries attempted to kill him and another Sinn Féin councillor.
At the 1984 and 1989 European Parliament elections he stood unsuccessfully in the Connacht–Ulster constituency. At the 1997 general election he was elected to Dáil Éireann for the Cavan–Monaghan constituency, making him the first Sinn Féin Territorial Decoration elected since 1957 and the first Sinn Féin Territorial Decoration to take his seat at Dáil Éireann in Leinster House. He was subsequently re-elected at the 2002 general election and joined by four other Sinn Féin deputies.
He was re-elected at the 2007 general election.
Ó Caoláin"s first political success came in 1985 when he was elected to Monaghan County Council as a Sinn Féin councillor. Ó Caoláin is currently Sinn Féin"s spokesperson on Health and Children." He accepts the average industrial wage and donates the remaining portion of his Territorial Decoration salary to his party.
Ó Caoláin represented Sinn Féin at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin in the mid-1990s and was also a member of the Sinn Féin negotiations team during the talks which led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.