The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has a tender side. In Mothers: Memories from Famous Daughters and Sons, published by the O'Brien Press for UNICEF, he pays homage to his mother and in a common with a couple of other celebrity contributors has written a poem. It's a heartfelt tribute and goes with a lovely photo of the late Julia Ahern and her son.
But the old photos of mothers with their yet-to-be famous babies are the best. A tiny Pat Rabbitte has a head of long curls (See Sadbh, Weekend 8). He tells readers what he has never written before - that his mother died of cancer when he was 16 and that "the stark awfulness of its import hurts even now". But he has good memories. "In the austere rural Ireland of the 1950s and early 1960s, to have a returned `Yank' for a mother introduced a slightly exotic note. My mother had spent almost 10 years in the US before returning on holidays and marrying my father. As a result, her horizons were somewhat wider than the typically insular outlook of the time."
Fellow New Labour deputy Liz McManus was born in Canada when her father Tim O'Driscoll was with the Department of External Affairs, and the photo of mother and daughter is among the most glamorous in the book.
Northern Secretary, Mo Mowlam says she thinks she inherited from her mother the persistence that keeps her going whatever the odds and obstacles.
Former EU Commissioner Pee Flynn says his mother was a big woman, strong in mind and body and before her time, as she worked outside the home all her life. She was a costumier, he says, who drove and played golf. "You could present her with a photographed garment from the most recent French collection and she could reproduce it in every cut, finish and fold, with nothing more than a look at the picture.. . Good taste was part of it."
Mary Banotti MEP says her mother was widowed at 38 and with six children under 10 went back to work as a domestic science teacher. Tony Gregory tells of his mother leaving rural poverty in Co Offaly to work as a waitress in Dublin sending money back home. At nearly 40, she married a casual labourer for the Dublin Port and Dock Board and then devoted her life to providing the best possible chance for her two children.
Senator Mary Henry's mother modelled occasionally before she married and was photographed in the Cork Examiner in a dress which showed her knees. "She was the best cook in the world," writes her daughter.
Michael D. Higgins has contributed a poem and Minister of State, Liz O'Donnell writes that her mother Carmel, as she calls her, was struck by polio at the age of three and had a childhood of operations, hospitalisation and callipers. "Her spirit was unaffected. She was a great beauty. Undaunted by her disfigured leg, she went on to play camogie." To this day she helps out in every possible way. "My children draw from her as I do. She will be the `making' of them, as she was of me."