It's 15 June 2010 and Leinster House is a hive of activity. Fine Gael has put down a motion of no confidence in Taoiseach Brian Cowen after two reports into the Irish banking crisis have criticised the government's fiscal policies when Cowen was Minister for Finance.

But the Fine Gael motion of no confidence is merely a sideshow to the real action. The Labour Party has just become the most popular political party in the country for the first time ever in an Ipsos MRBI/Irish Times opinion poll. As a result, the Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny has become the victim of a leadership heave bid from his deputy leader Richard Bruton and a cabal of other key party figures.

As Kenny rises in the Dáil to outline the case against Cowen in the debate on the confidence motion, the knives are out for the Fine Gael leader.

As the high drama unfolds in the Dáil chamber, Sinn Féin TD Martin Ferris has retired to his office.

The television is on in Ferris's office and his eyes are fixed on the screen.

Many other TDs have also returned to their Leinster House offices to work and to watch the proceedings in the Dáil chamber unfold on the TV screens.

But Ferris is not watching the live feed of the action from the chamber. His mind is elsewhere. Thousands of people have gathered in the sunshine outside the Guildhall in Derry. The final report of the Saville inquiry into the deaths of 13 people in the city on Bloody Sunday in 1972 has just been published.

History is unfolding as the crowd in Derry burst into a spontaneous cheer.

The relatives of the civil rights marchers who were killed are the first to see the Saville report and they hold their arms out of the windows in the Guildhall and give it the thumbs up.

RTÉ television has devoted a special live broadcast to the event and three words keep running across the ticker on the bottom of the screen: 'unjust and unjustifiable'.

Ferris keeps his eyes fixed on the screen and mutters the words "unjust and unjustifiable". He is delighted that the innocent Bloody Sunday victims have finally been vindicated.

This day means a lot to Ferris. A parliamentarian in Leinster House for eight years, his long history as a man of violence was directly connected to Bloody Sunday. Although he had joined the IRA two years before that, it was events like the atrocity in Derry in January 1972 that had goaded Ferris, and hundreds of other young men, into joining, or escalating their involvement in, the IRA.

Ferris recalled: "I got involved in the republican movement on the day my father was buried. That was on 27 or 28 May, 1970. And I became really actively involved after Bloody Sunday in 1972. The optics of what was happening in the six counties encouraged me to join the IRA. You had television so it was in the room with you. We saw everything first- hand that was happening. Bloody Sunday had a huge effect on people my age and it helped to make decisions on our future."

While Ferris had made a life-changing decision to join the IRA in 1970, like the majority of young men of his age in Kerry, he had a passion for Gaelic football.

On the back of some impressive performances with his club Churchill, Ferris broke into the Kerry county scene in 1972 when he played for 'the Kingdom's' under-21 team.

That year, he scored the winning goal in the Munster final but the team was beaten by Galway in the All Ireland semi-final a few weeks later.

From 1972 on, Ferris's activity in the IRA increased and by 1973 he found himself on the run from the gardaí.

Even though he was still eligible to play for the Kerry under-21 team in 1973, Ferris's IRA activity meant that he was not involved with the team for most of the year.

After Kerry won the Munster Under-21 title in 1973, former Kerry legend Joe Keohane, who was a selector on the team, contacted Ferris.

"I was on the run at that stage and I was not living in Kerry a lot of the time, but Keohane made contact with me to see if I would be available for the All Ireland semi-final. The match was in Tralee and there was a possibility that I was going to be lifted by the gardaí so I didn't play," recalls Ferris.

He had originally agreed to play the game so he was named to play as a corner-forward on the Kerry team. But fears that he was going to be arrested by the gardaí meant that Ferris discreetly watched the game from the crowd.

Standing there on the crowded terrace, Ferris found it amusing when some supporters shouted abuse at his replacement, Michael O'Shea, who was wearing Ferris's number 13 jersey. Not realising that Ferris had been replaced by O'Shea, they shouted lines such as: "Come on, Ferris, get into it! Wake up!"

Kerry did enough in that game to earn a place in the All Ireland Under-21 final against Mayo in Ennis, Co Clare.

As the game was in Clare, Ferris knew the gardaí there would not pay as much attention to him so he was able to tog out in the Kerry colours, getting a lift to the game with his friend and teammate, Batt O'Shea.

"I was on the run but it was probably only in Tralee that I would have been picked up. A lot of it would have been localised stuff that I was involved in, so there was no national hunt for me at the time," he recalls.

Having missed the semi-final, Ferris started the game on the subs' bench.

But as Mayo were winning by 0-9 to Kerry's 0-1, Ferris was put on a few minutes before half-time.

Future Fine Gael TD and Mayo manager John O'Mahony was playing in the left corner-back position and Ferris was sent in to play on him as Kerry's right corner-forward. Before he went onto the pitch, Joe Keohane said to Ferris, "Let them know you are around", and he did just that.

"Within a minute there was a breaking ball and he [O'Mahony] caught it coming out of defence. I threw my arm across him and I hit him so hard that I broke the scaphoid bone in my wrist," recalls Ferris about his first encounter with a man who would sit a few seats away from him in the Dáil chamber some 34 years later.

"I knew there was damage done but I didn't know that I had just broken a bone in my hand moments after I came on. There was murder in the second half as the game got very physical."

Ferris was switched to play in the full-forward position a few minutes into the second half, and helped Kerry pull off a major comeback and win the game by two points.

"I got a touch of a ball that ended up in the net. Mikey Sheehy took the credit for it and I couldn't argue with that as I could have been in the square when I hit it."

Ferris still has his All Ireland medal at home somewhere but he is not even sure where exactly it is. "Medals do not really matter to me. But I suppose that All Ireland title probably means a lot more to me now than it did then."

The 1973 under-21 Kerry team was a who's who of young players who went on to become household names in later years. Among Ferris's teammates were Jimmy Deenihan, Ger Power, Páidí Ó Sé, John Egan and Mikey Sheehy, all of whom went on to win several senior All Ireland titles.

So, looking back, does Ferris regret that the IRA got in the way of a fledgling football career in the early 1970s?

He says: "The level of commitment Mikey Sheehy, Tim Kennelly, Jimmy Deenihan and all of them had was unbelievable. There was absolute commitment to football and they did not have any other distractions. My ultimate commitment was my involvement in the struggle.

"I don't know if I was ever good enough. I would like to know, and I will never find out if I was good enough. I made the choice and to this day I am convinced it was the right choice.

"At the end of the day, the management and my teammates would have to have asked if I had the necessary commitment. But my commitments were elsewhere. If I had the commitment necessary I would now know if I was good enough. But football was secondary, even though I loved competing and playing."

Throughout the 1970s, Ferris was in and out of Portlaoise prison, serving various sentences for crimes such as an armed robbery of a co-op in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, in 1975 and membership of the IRA.

Two of Ferris's friends and teammates from the 1973 team, Páidí Ó Sé and John Egan, went on to become gardaí and were actually stationed in Portlaoise when Ferris was in jail there.

Ferris was released from one of his prison sentences at the end of June 1977. He met his future wife Marie and the couple married in January 1978.

Around this time, Ferris returned to the football pitch. He played a number of challenge games with Kerry, including a game against Laois, where a number of the prison officers from the jail in Portlaoise were lined out for the O'Moore county side.

He says: "They were on one end of the field and I was on the other end. There was nothing said and we just played our game."

Ferris got a call up to the Kerry panel on the back of his performances in the challenge games.

"I was on the panel for the 1978 Munster final and the Friday before the game I was lifted by the gardaí and held for 48 hours. I was released on the Sunday at about 1.10pm and the match was on at 3.30pm in Cork. I got there but there wasn't even a jersey left when I got there," he remembers.

Mick O'Dwyer, the Kerry manager at the time, was building what is today widely regarded as the greatest Gaelic football team of all time and there was no place for a player like Ferris who was not able to give 100% commitment after that.

Ferris describes O'Dwyer as a "very honourable person" and recognises that he, Ferris, did not have the necessary commitment to hold on to his place on the Kerry panel.

O'Dwyer claims: "I have no doubt that Martin would have won many All Ireland senior football medals if he had given football his 100% concentration. He had everything we would look for in a star player."

But Ferris's playing days were ground to a halt with his involvement in the subversive activities of the IRA.

Martin Ferris has always maintained his passion for the GAA and his family is heavily involved in the Ardfert club. He was a selector with the Ardfert team that won the All Ireland Junior Club Championship in Croke Park in 2006.

In an amazing feat, the club returned to Croke Park the following year to win the All Ireland Intermediate Club Championship.

He does not know for how long more he will stay in politics and if his daughter Toireasa will succeed him in his Dáil seat.

"To be quite honest about it, there are days when I think that I am at this since 1970 and it would be nice, as my health is good, to spend a few years with my grandchildren before I go to the next world, whatever that is," he says.

"Then there are other days I think that, Jesus, we have so much to do all the time with the struggle. And in most instances that takes precedence over everything."

It is over 40 years since he chose the IRA and politics over football. Politics has always taken precedence. Old habits die hard.

This is an edited extract from Dáil Stars: From Leinster House to Croke Park by Conor McMorrow, published by Mentor Books priced €16.99

GAA Days did you know?...

» Taoiseach Brian Cowen played inter-county football with Offaly up to under-21 level and played in full-forward position for a time with Offaly legends Matt Connor and Brendan Lowry

» Former Labour Party leader Brendan Corish played inter-county football with Wexford

» Billy Timmins, current Fine Gael TD for Wicklow, is a rarity in the garden county as he is an All Ireland winner. He came on as a sub for Baltinglass when they won the All Ireland club football title in 1990

» Dr Brian Gibbons, a Welsh assembly member and former minister, is the son of Dr Hugh Gibbons, who won an All Ireland medal with Roscommon in 1944 before becoming a Fianna Fáil TD from 1965 to 1977

» Séamus Mallon, former deputy leader of the SDLP, who was an independent senator from March to December 1982, played inter-county football with Armagh

» Ceann Comhairle Séamus Kirk was a Louth football star until a 1972 ankle injury that left him in a plaster for two years finished his football career.

» Eoin 'The Irish Mussolini' O'Duffy invited a Nazi spy to accompany him to the 1940 All Ireland football final in Croke Park.