'I swept in like a film star'

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW - LIZ O' DONNELL:SHE CAN LAUGH about it now, albeit heavily laced with wry "what do you do?" shrugs. Nearly 18 months on, Liz O'Donnell can dwell on the mortification of a very public rejection: "Humiliation . . . hurt . . . like a personal swipe in the face."

As the election count ground on, that May evening in 2007, she watched from home as colleagues bit the dust. "It was like an execution. We were all separate from each other, all at different counts. It felt a bit like a coconut shy, or shooting bottles off a wall. It was like an out-of-body experience."

It was that separateness that gave it the quality of reality television. No opportunity for a team huddle, or to agree a party statement, or even a defiant kicker, such as the US tank commander's at Bastogne in 1944: "They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards." Disorganisation. Bewilderment. Losing ugly. The last stand of the cool, whip-smart, pro-business party.

She was leaving to concede her own seat when the party leader, Michael McDowell, dramatically resigned in the RDS. There had been no contact between them. "I had spoken to Mary [Harney] but I couldn't get Michael on the phone all day. It was either switched off or just not answering. We didn't know what was happening."

How odd was that? "Well, I was surprised. It would have been nice to talk to him because I was the deputy leader. And I couldn't get him on the phone. And suddenly I'm the leader - even though I've lost my seat . . . ," she says, arching a well-shaped eyebrow.

Her 22-year-old daughter, Laura, adopted the stiff-upper-lip strategy as they prepared for the walk of shame at the count centre. "It was all very sad and Laura said something like, 'things happen for a reason'. I was thinking I'd get away with going in my jeans and a smart jacket but she said: 'Mom, no, this is your last hurrah now. Put on your suit, get glammed up and go out as you always did.'"

So she pulled on the little navy suit specially bought for election day. "People who'd worked for me for six weeks had really had a rough campaign and were devastated. I said, 'No crying . . . I'm going to breeze in here in my suit'. I had my lip gloss on, swept in and nobody could believe it. Because you know what's it like at the end of count day - the dreary community school, and the boxes, and the exhausted civil servants and everyone white under the fluorescent lights - and I swept in there like a film star, metaphorically speaking I mean, because I'd had time at home to absorb it - unlike poor Nora Owen, who lost her seat live on television, I'd had time to gather my thoughts. I went live to the 9 o'clock news and was asked about Michael McDowell resigning live on air and I can't remember what I said. I can't remember much of that night. It was all weird."

So what was she then, this woman who had soared from full-time, suburban mother to glamorous, high-flying politician for 15 years? Booted out by the electorate, leader of a calamitous party, and worse - for someone who believes that unelected leaders are "Mugabe-esque" - a leader without a mandate

She was too tired to care. "When my end came, it was almost like a release. The whole leadership change-over [from Harney to McDowell] and the election had been very stressful. I just thought maybe it would be better if we all go out together. There was that feeling, 'we have gone down to two, this is not sustainable'. I had felt that before and I had been part, with Mary, of building the party up from four in 1997, working really hard to keep the show on the road. But two . . . ?"

THERE WAS A VIEW THAT THE PDs had grown complacent and that they had lost their moral compass. She disagrees with both charges. Responsibility for the famous "lost weekend" during the election, when McDowell led his troops up and down the hill - suspecting that then taoiseach Bertie Ahern had not told the full truth about his finances - is left resolutely in McDowell's lap. "I had to leave it to Michael's judgment because I didn't know the veracity of the difference between what he had understood and what he was hearing. That was a terrible time. It was like living in a soap opera. Only one week into an election and this one issue was dominating all discourse. We were willing to follow his judgment; it was on the basis of what had been exchanged between them."

Her own gut feeling was, and is, "to leave it to the tribunal . . . What proof did Michael have? The taoiseach gave a comprehensive account of himself. It seems the people believed him because Fianna Fáil won a record number of seats," she says tonelessly.

At such times, it's clear that she's well pleased to be out of the fray. The PDs, she says, "were demonized for their very existence, like no other party. When we lost all those seats, there were people literally dancing in the streets . . . as if we were all evil people who had brought a great wreckage on society."

They couldn't win, she felt. They were perceived as upper-middle-class, right-wingers from Dublin 4/6. Yet, she is the inner-city-Dublin-born daughter of a working-class family, who moved to Caherdavin in Limerick at the age of 11, and cycled for more than an hour across the city to a part-time job to support herself at Trinity; Mary Harney is the child of a small farmer.

They were also criticised as "too womany", courtesy of the then political editor of The Irish Times, Geraldine Kennedy. "But what is equality all about? We were the only party that achieved full equality in terms of representation in the Dáil and suddenly, that was a negative?"

If she were formulating the budget now, she would not "have gone next or near old people [in the over-70s medical-card controversy]. No. That's even beyond politics. It's failing to see the anxiety that old people have. It's not about money, actually; it's about security. It's just not worth it for €100m. A hundred million? You could get it anywhere."

On the property bubble (during which she was in government), she says carefully: "I think, in retrospect, there is a view that we overly incentivised that whole class."

You will not catch her criticising Fianna Fáil, however; not directly. "The people who are there are people of experience - and it's not glaringly obvious to me that the opposition would do any better of a job. Richard Bruton is a fine politician but he is in a big lumpy party which fails to get sufficient votes at election to be in Government and that's what it's all about. I wonder where Fine Gael are going to go now that we're gone? There was a huge amount of celebration in their circles about our unfortunate demise. So maybe they will start to shift into that space where we were - which was a pro-enterprise, pro-business, radical edge to us because we actually didn't care what people thought about us. We were used to people not liking us."

Anyway, she says, it's a small party's fate to be "very vulnerable". So will the Greens implode? "The Greens are different . . . [they'll survive] if they keep focused on their green stuff, because that's a kind of a subject-related vote. People will vote in Green TDs if they're trained orang-utans because it's almost like a religion."

Does she care? After the election debacle, she made her mind up that everything was over, party included. "Yes, I would have called it then. We didn't have enough people - but people wanted to go on and they've limped on till now. With two deputies - and remember, Mary's not running next time - there was no future in that unit. How could you build up a party out of one person? If you don't have a critical mass of people who are electable to the Dáil, you don't have a party. You might have a couple of thousand members, but unless you have horses to run the race, write the policies, have the ideas . . . Politics is about ideas and communicating those ideas. If you don't have people to do that, if you don't have ideas to communicate - not the old ideas that were there when Des [O'Malley] formed the party . . . if the party was to be sustained now, the party should be articulating. It's obviously over. When did you hear a spokesperson from the party talking about the current crisis? The banking crisis? The property crisis? If Michael was still there, if I was still there, we would have views on this stuff. And we'd be looking at solutions and possibilities or having a view and inputting into the debate."

IF THAT SOUNDS like a woman champing to be asked, she denies it. "No. I don't want to be in there. By the time I lost my seat, it was probably the right time and I think, as my daughter said, 'things happen for a reason'." And yet, while discussing the inevitable fall-out for the family of a modern politician, she notes, almost wistfully, "it was just as it was getting easier" from that point of view, that she lost her seat.

She was a full-time mother, a lawyer on a career break from McCann Fitzgerald, when Mary Harney "put the evil eye" on her in 1991 and told she would be perfect for politics. "My children were young: Robert was only four and Laura was six. And when I came out [of politics] last year, Robert was 20. I have to say - and I am conscious of it - your children are short-changed. There's no doubt about that. If I'm to be honest, it's not even about the time you are missing - though you are missing for long periods - but that you're totally pre-occupied even when you're there. You cannot deny that. It's a preoccupation because politics is so pervasive. You're always on duty. Even if you're home watching the TV, you're kind of still watching the news; the news is your business. You can't collapse in front of the TV . . . People can become embittered because they are not present to you."

With her husband, Michael Carson, a senior counsel, she worked hard at keeping their children and personal lives private, but she never downplays the difficulties.

THE QUESTION HANGS IN THE AIR: is high politics do-able for a mother at all? "With great difficulty. It's tailor-made for men who have wives who can afford to stay at home and basically fill their shoes in every way, supportively. You look at the women in the Dáil today; very few have small children. They're at different stages in their lives. Mildred [Fox] gave up. Mary Coughlan has small children, but then her opportunity has come to be a Minister in the Cabinet and Tánaiste, and - like me - her children are at a young, vulnerable age. So that's choppy waters she has to navigate."

Of course, these questions are never addressed to male politicians. "Men do it all the time, but it's probably more acceptable in society that men abandon their children and go off and rule the world, masters of the universe. At least I always went home at night, even if it was at 11.30pm, knackered; rural TDs are gone on Monday and probably not home till Thursday night or Friday morning. But it's less acceptable, internally and externally, subjectively and objectively, for a woman to make that choice and say, 'this is my opportunity, I have a contribution to make, I'm going to do this for a finite period of time'. Of course, for me, it ended up being for 15 years of my life. Oh yes, I absolutely felt I had found my niche. I was capable and I was able for it. I was younger, doing important things."

The mistake, she says, is to think that the worry is over when the children reach, say, seven. "You can delegate when they're small. When it was most difficult for me was when they were teenagers and they start answering back or you shrank their jeans because you didn't remember to not turn on the dryer and it's a national emergency . . . ," she smiles wryly. "I'd just say it does have a cost." Laura has gone on to become a freelance make-up artist. Robert is embarking on a career as a photographer.

The next day, co-incidentally, she was heading off to Ennis to address a women's gathering about the merits of work-life balance. And what would Liz O'Donnell know about that? She roars laughing. "Nothing! Absolutely nothing! But at least I can share my pain. I don't have any solutions; it's the unfinished business of the women's movement. Because you just muddle through. Or else you don't do it and shut up. Just stay home and shut up!"

Meanwhile, she had risen to stardom on the national stage, bright, articulate, forensic in her questioning as an opposition spokeswoman, the one who needled John Bruton, as taoiseach, into saying that the deputy hadn't asked "the right question". She was a trenchant critic - in government - of the asylum seeker "shambles" and a doughty supporter of maintaining overseas-development obligations as junior minister in the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In that role, she had charge of Strand Two (the North-South dimension) of the Peace Process, and was a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement. "If I never did anything else, I could have hung up my boots after that. It was such a huge privilege to be there."

SHE IS ACUTELY CONSCIOUS THAT it was the vagaries of the electoral system that landed her - "a most unlikely person" - in these privileged positions. "It was probably the experience of my life. And there I just found myself by the spin of the dice."

But she also believes that a woman's presence was vital. "It was important to feminise the discussions, certainly it was. It was important from the point of view that I'm a modern liberal woman and there are very few women in the ranks of unionism . . . I'm not saying I was there for the visuals - I was making my contribution in every way - but it was important for the country to be represented, at least in part, by a woman at that level."

She cried with exhaustion - not with euphoria, the minefield ahead was too obvious - when it was over. But instead of heading straight for her husband and children waiting over in Donegal for the planned Easter break, she and the others were whisked back to Dublin, such was the "poisonous" atmosphere on the streets of the North. Again, another surreal scene, as she sat home alone, in her coat, in a freezing house, with no food and not even a bottle of wine in the fridge, watching the tumultuous scenes outside Stormont, until she was finally rescued by a girlfriend and champagne.

But that was then. One of the outcomes of that nine o'clock news appearance on election night was an offer to present a series for Animo television on development aid. She was perceived to be a natural and it's evident that she would like to do more of that kind of broadcasting.

She might also have been a natural for a sheaf of non-executive directorships; but since her one commercial foray while a TD - on to Denis O'Brien's Communicorp board, from which her departure unfortunately coincided with some of O'Brien's more fraught tribunal appearances - there have been no others.

She has never been a stocks and shares woman; her only such venture was into the ill-fated Eircom shares and, like most, she failed to get out in time. Any extra money is used to buy art. Meanwhile, she spends her time chairing and addressing conferences and doing some consultancy work, mainly in the overseas-development field.

She is currently sharpening her pens to write a memoir. Since she obviously feels she has little to lose, it might be one of the more interesting ones.