Terry Keane:THE SOCIAL diarist and fashion writer Terry Keane, who has died of cancer aged 68, said she would like to be remembered as "an intelligent, warm, loving person who loves her family and is loved by her family".
However a meeting on the social round as columnist for the Sunday Pressin the 1970s with future taoiseach Charles Haughey put paid to that. Haughey, then in political limbo, was always a formidable operator on the social scene.
When introduced to a glamorous woman, he held her right hand firmly in his, while placing his left hand on her elbow and guiding her in close to him, fixed her with those hooded eyes.
Keane was no pushover but he liked her sparky wit. It is a pity that, as it appears, she has left no serious account of a remarkable love affair between two headstrong people, lasting more than a quarter century - especially when one was a writer.
The daughter of Irish parents living near London, the young Terry O'Donnell enrolled in Trinity College Dublin to study medicine, but did not complete the course. Her beauty led her into modelling and she did some writing. The Irish Timestook her on to write about fashion and she later joined the Sunday Press, soon to be locked in a vicious circulation war with the Sunday Independent.
Journalists often benefit from circulation wars as rival titles bid for their services and for a while Terry did, as she was wooed and won by the Sunday Independent.
There, deputy editor Anne Harris skilfully built Terry's diary column, the Keane Edge, into a "must read" feature, blending Terry's blasé references to the mysterious man friend "Sweetie" in with political and social titbits, some written by other contributors.
The reader was flattered into sharing the secret. "Sweetie" was a Very Important Man and the glimpses of life at their table in the Coq Hardi fascinated.
Not being told explicitly who he was removed any possible awkwardness about a wife and family from the public mind.
The "castle in the air" that underlay the Keane Edgecame crashing to earth one night in Ireland's largest show business amphitheatre, the Late Late Show, in May 1999. Terry revealed, if not all, then far too much about her 27-year relationship with Charles Haughey.
The intriguing veils of mystery parted - to reveal a not very edifying tale of adultery in high places. The Terry Keane show was over, courtesy of Gay Byrne. Three pages of confessional revelations in the Sunday Timesfinished the matter, in a way that Terry came bitterly to regret.
Why? Those close to her during that time believe that she was stung by Haughey's attempt to "rub her out of his life" after he had earlier told her he was ending the affair. A gossip columnist mistress who regaled friends with stories about their lavish lifestyle was an uncomfortable accessory for a former taoiseach under investigation for corruption.
Earlier in 1999, the Moriarty tribunal opening statement had detailed payments to the former taoiseach uncovered by the tribunal totalling almost £1.25 million.
Others blamed it on yet another round in the newspaper circulation wars. A book which told all about the Keane-Haughey romance was in the pipeline, it was said. (It has yet to appear.)
The Sunday Timeswanted to poach Terry from the Sunday Independent, and paid large sums for pictures showing the lovers in the Haughey family home in Kinsealy, and Terry needed the money, following a disastrous investment - and she had just been diagnosed with heart disease.
For whatever reason, in one fell swoop, she broke her pact with her readers, alienated public opinion, burned her bridges with Charles Haughey and the Sunday Independent and caused pain to her family and friends.
She continued to work as a social diarist for the Sunday Timeswith a two-year contract that formed part of the deal for the original story. Later she moved to France and, in another Late Late Showconfession in 2006, she told Pat Kenny that she regretted having caused so much hurt - "so many people were hurt, so deeply, my nearest and dearest and his [ Haughey's] family too".
Born Therese Ann O'Donnell to Irish parents in Guildford in Surrey in September 1939, she was the only child of Tim O'Donnell, a doctor and Ann, a bank official.
When she was still a baby she was sent to Ireland as an evacuee from the second World War which began just as she was born. She later said that the 2½-year separation from her parents had a profound effect on her adult life.
Keane's mother was 39 when she was born and moved to Ireland to live with her daughter later in life. The two women shared a home until her mother moved to a nursing home at the age of 97.
Terry returned to Ireland as a teenager to study at Trinity. She met a young barrister named Ronan Keane and the two were engaged by the early 1960s. During a break in their engagement she had a brief affair with a Liverpool actor, James Donnelly, and became pregnant.
She travelled to England to have the baby in 1962. She called the baby Wendy and gave her up for adoption. She was reunited in 1981 with her adult daughter, who was christened Jane by her adoptive parents.
Donnelly died in 1996.
Three months after giving up the baby, Terry married Ronan Keane. He was a bright young lawyer who became a High Court judge in 1979, joining the Supreme Court in 1986, and becoming Chief Justice in 2000.
The Keanes had three children, Madeleine, a journalist, Justine, who married celebrity gardener Diarmuid Gavin, and Timothy, who died in 2004 following an accidental fall.
Though their marriage did not succeed, and they separated in the early 1980s, Terry and Ronan Keane did not divorce. They remained on good terms, and the extended family circle later included Terry's first-born Jane.
Contemporaries remember Terry as a woman who did not type her column but preferred to dictate items from her notes to be typed up by anyone available in the office at the time.
Memories of her tend to rely heavily on phrases like "outrageous sense of fun". Her friend, fellow fashion writer Ruth Kelly, recalled her quick wit. When Ruth complained that Terry had inadvertently crushed her hat, Terry flashed back: "Just be glad your head wasn't in it."
Her presence in the newsroom of the Sunday Independent led to several surreal moments. "Brown Thomas bags arriving with free clothes, flowers from Kinsealy and two or three people writing her column. It was all so very very dysfunctional and weird at times," a colleague recalls.
Keane lived in France until two years ago, returning to Ireland following her son's death. By then she had contracted cancer. Until quite recently she was writing for Social & Personal magazine.
She is survived by her three daughters, Jane, Madeleine and Justine.
Terry Keane (Therese Ann O'Donnell): born September 9th, 1939, died May 31st, 2008.