P P McGuinness (BEc '61) 1938 - 2008

Padraic Pearse McGuinness, who has died in Sydney, was a point man among this elite group. Each week, at his peak, he wrote five 1200-word columns that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne.

McGuinness ranged freely over a multitude of topics, pontificating on ideology, sociology and anything else that took his fancy.

Like many of his generation, McGuinness had youthful flirtations with leftish ideology, but by middle age he had become something of a scrub bull. He continued to attack the Establishment, but by the 1980s he saw the Establishment as the left.

Born on October 27, 1938, McGuinness's fifth-generation Australian parents still wore the green, naming him in honour of the poet executed after the Easter Rising in Dublin 22 years before. His mother, Elvia, daughter of a Sydney clerk, was lace-curtain Irish; his father, Frank, off a Mallee farm, was more brewery Irish, and also a journalist.

His brothers back at Swan Hill paid for their 11-year-old nephew's education at Riverview College in Sydney. But being four years too old to fit the Jesuit maxim, P. P. McGuinness never really became a priest's boy, and when drought meant the uncles could no longer pay the fees he eschewed Jesuit charity and took himself to Sydney Boys High School. He also quit Catholicism, and became an atheist.

Yet he assiduously watered the dry earth of his Irish and Jesuit past - to the point of naming his daughter Parnell after the Irish Home advocate Charles Stewart Parnell.

A shy but theatrical man with a penchant for black clothes - a habit acquired, he said, long before Phillip Adams cut his image from the same cloth. McGuinness said the garb combined the colour of confessor, anarchist and existentialist, while taking the worry out of what to wear.

Finishing school in 1955, McGuinness hung with the Sydney Push, courtesy of his brother Michael (a former mathematics teacher at Sydney Grammar School) and sister Judith (then a member of the Communist Party of Australia), teetered towards anarchism but joined the ALP, took an economics degree at Sydney university in 1960, tutored, odd-jobbed and sailed for Europe in May 1963.

McGuinness spent much of the "swinging London" period with the KGB-front Moscow Narodny Bank, mainly in foreign exchange, completed a masters degree at the London School of Economics, became the first Australian to work for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and taught. In Many 1968 Paddy the Red rode a bike into strike-bound Paris and watched the people under the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit stop the city. He also met his East German wife, Brigitte.

Back home in 1971, McGuinness wrote on economics for The Australian Financial Review and then became an economics adviser to Bill Hayden in the new Whitlam government. Colleagues remembered McGuinness gleefully hammering doctors who resisted Medicare, and his almost pathological detestation of the treasurer, Jim Cairns.

McGuinness left the Whitlam government after only 15 months, blaming a bad relationship with the treasury head, John Stone.

He rejoined the Financial Review as economics editor and resumed his career as a film critic on The National Times. McGuinness became the Review editor in 1980 and editor-in-chief in February 1982, achieving national notoriety two months later by declaring on his front page that Australia had entered a recession and was in imminent danger of a "genuine depression".

The stricken Fraser government attacked McGuinness but he haughtily dismissed criticisms, proclaiming that nobody in Australian journalism had his depth or training. "I was right: I picked it exactly," he said modestly a year later when voters ejected Malcolm Fraser.

A period in France followed, and he returned home to write for The Australian and then the Herald.

He stood for Leichhardt Council as an independent, pushing the quixotic secession of his beloved Balmain. He left Fairfax in 2004.

Ten years as editor of the former CIA-funded publication Quadrant consolidated the monthly after a troubled time. His wife died in 1999, and he is survived by his daughter.

This is an edited version from an article by Damien Murphy from The Sydney Morning Herald. Click here to view the entire text.