THERE IS life after politics. If Mrs Moire Geoghegan-Quinn hadn't already been convinced of this, one Mr Charles Haughey rang her on Monday night to let her know.
This was the same Mr Haughey who, just hours earlier, had been reported in the Evening Herald as saying unpleasant things about her. Fear of losing her seat had probably caused her to quit politics, he was quoted as saying.
"He phoned and he was very upset," Mrs Geoghegan-Quinn told The Irish Times yesterday. "He said he did not say what was alleged and he had rung to apologise for any hurt that might have been caused to me, John and the boys. He also said there was a life outside politics."
Yesterday she looked relaxed and content, like a woman who had just received good news. She started her day in Dublin with a hair-do at Eugene O'Reilly's salon in Brown Thomas, where she has been going for 10 years. There she was presented with "a huge bouquet of flowers". She walked into Leinster House with them hidden in a large Brown Thomas bag.
Throughout the afternoon, deputies and Leinster House staff called to her office to give her their good wishes. "Charlie McCreevy was one of the first in, saying I had had several long conversations with him last week and never mentioned what I was going to do."
Colleagues called by all day. "They've been making me feel sad because they're so sad."
She had countless phone messages and a pile of mail, including a "very poignant" handwritten note from Transfusion Positive, one of the campaigning groups established in the wake of the hepatitis C crisis.
Yesterday she was not yet on a lap of honour. Last night she began what is likely to be her final high-profile parliamentary act, proposing a private member's motion supporting haemophiliac victims of that crisis.