Jack Mulcahy had fought hard and not always cleanly to become Taoiseach. Now in power, he suddenly finds himself threatened by a major controversy. Interested? Throw in a personal vendetta, a few carefully planned leaks to the press, shady deals from the past and an illicit affair and what have you got? A daring resume of recent political life in Ireland? No - but the theme of Senator Maurice Manning's forthcoming political thriller, Betrayal (to be published on November 12th) will bring a wry grin to many a politicallyerudite reader.
"The book isn't a Haughey expose. It is entirely my own creation," says Manning frankly. "There are a few people in it who are thinly disguised but they will be happy enough with their portrayal if they recognise themselves," he adds.
The Fine Gael Senator and lecturer in politics at University College Dublin is one of a select group of politicians who have turned their hand to writing novels. These include former Fianna Fail TD Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, Democratic Left TD Liz McManus and Fine Gael TD Alan Shatter (who was abroad and uncontactable for this article).
So what is it about politics that draws them to creative writing?
"I read The Polling Of The Dead by the late John Kelly which was set during elections in the 1960s. I thought it was very funny and I decided I'd try to do something myself," says Manning, who is already an established figure in academic writing and is also currently writing a biography of former Fine Gael leader James Dillon. Manning and Geoghegan-Quinn both admit that writing fiction has an escapist dimension. While Manning confines his fiction writing to holidays, Geoghegan-Quinn found writing her novel, The Green Diamond, to be a therapeutic exercise following a difficult period in politics. "I started to think about it seriously in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the '94 coalition government. I was feeling down and I needed to channel my energies differently, into an area far removed from politics," she explains. "I'd been writing diaries from the age of 13. So I started to trawl over my diaries and go through my experiences from student days in Dublin in the 1960s which I fed into the computer at random. Then I broke my ankle spectacularly at the Christmas party. I was 10 weeks in plaster and in a lot of pain and discomfort. Writing fixed my mind. It was a lifesaver at the time."
Liz McManus, whose novel, Acts Of Subversion was published in 1991, finds the process of writing more difficult since she moved from being a councillor to a TD. "When I wrote my novel, I also had a newspaper column and my main work was writing. Since I was elected to the Dail in 1992, writing has become extremely peripheral. It's a different way of thinking. In politics, you have to make your mind up quickly and have an opinion on lots of subjects whereas as a writer, you are much more reflective. "When I am writing, I have to submit to the voices coming out of my unconscious. It is a more rounded approach, something that you are not always in control of whereas politics is fast and absolute. I find it very difficult to marry the two.
"Since I was now no longer a Minister, I thought I might create that space in my life again but you can't simply switch on and off. I've gone up to Annaghmakerrig (the residential centre for artists in Co Monaghan) from time to time to write and found it to be a tranquil, sustained and nourishing experience.
"But on a recent visit there, I couldn't write a word. I have to allow my mind to open up again and take its pace. I've a low level of productivity when it comes to writing but I'm happy with that. I'm also in a writers' group which is very supportive." All three politicians-turnednovelists agree that political life is a rich source of inspiration, albeit in different ways. While The Green Diamond did have some political figures in it, the inspiration was drawn from an earlier period of Maire Geoghegan-Quinn's life. She is now "dipping in and out of" a sequel but doesn't envisage writing political fiction in a big way. Meanwhile, her enthusiasm for the intricacies of political life has not waned.
"I've kept detailed political diaries since I went into politics. I have inputted quite a bit of those into the computer since I left politics and I'd love to do a political memoir but a lot of people will have to be dead first," she laughs. Last week's referendum on Cabinet confidentiality would, however, preclude her from including revelations of Cabinet discussions in such a book. Interestingly, former Fine Gael TD Gemma Hussey published her political diaries, At The Cutting Edge (1993), prior to the Supreme Court decision on Cabinet confidentiality, which prevented Ministers from discussing Cabinet business altogether and prompted the current Government to have a referendum on the issue.
"The huge interaction of people and motive and the fact that things are never black and white in politics offers great raw material for observers and writers," adds Manning, who incidentally is a quarter of the way through his second novel - a clerical thriller in which a very wealthy old bishop gets murdered and the Papal Nuncio is the a chief suspect.
"The trouble is that in recent times, fact has proven to be far more incredible than fiction, but I'm not interested in getting into `faction' writing. I'd prefer to keep my factual writing of a journalistic or academic nature and fiction writing apart." McManus says that she is not interested in chronicling the political happening of Dail Eireann. "I'm not a diarist. I tried and I failed. People tell me all the time that I should write about politics and I assume they mean writing about what happens in the Dail, but much of what happens in Dail Eireann is formalised. It is a very narrow experience in my view. "I also feel that the closer you write about the life you lead, the less creative it is. That's not to say that things in my life don't spark off fiction because they do. But what I write about is politics on a larger stage. I write about people who are faced with enormous challenges. I remember the 1950s in Ireland and my own life has paralleled the development of modern Ireland which has been a time of breathtaking change. I find that the changes have been so immense, so transforming for a society that it would be hard to write about anything else."
