As one daughter lands a publishing contract worth over $1 million, and the other prepares to marry a popstar, Bertie's girls appear to have inherited their father's taste for ambition, Shane Hegarty writes
Bertie Ahern may have been enjoying his break in Lanzarote, but it's his daughter Cecelia who has had her week in the sun. In the space of only a few days, she has gone from being a jobless postgraduate to the country's best-known - and possibly richest - first-time author.
An Irish and UK contract worth €300,000. A US deal worth €1 million. Foreign language rights and Hollywood deals still to come for her novel, PS, I Love You. She could be forgiven for sounding a little overwhelmed on the Today with Pat Kenny Show on Thursday morning.
"I wasn't expecting anything like that. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. I can't believe it," she said.
As an Ahern girl, however, Cecelia (21) will have grown used to the limelight. She and her sister Georgina (23) are no strangers to the social diaries. While they haven't quite ridden on the coat-tails of their famous father, their surname has at least ensured a certain interest in their progress. You will hardly find a sentence written about either of them that does not include the line: "daughter of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern".
Both Cecelia and her publicist have been keen to point out that her book deal has nothing to do with her surname. While being an Ahern may have a certain cachet here, in the UK and the US it will have had no influence at all. When the deals for Germany and the Netherlands were being negotiated, the publishers in those countries were apparently unaware of the author's name. In Ireland, however, no first-time author could have dreamt of the publicity given to this deal.
The Ahern sisters have not completely shied away from the publicity associated with their father. During last year's general election campaign, Georgina and her fiancé, Westlife's Nicky Byrne, took to the hustings to give Bertie a boost.
"Not taking away from their talent, but I know that for many Irish social pages, they are desperate for Irish celebrities, no matter how minor," says Maura O'Kiely, associate editor of Who magazine. "The fact that they are the Taoiseach's daughters obviously gives them an extra currency that they wouldn't have if they were ordinary people."
It is not Cecelia's first foray into the limelight. She has previously tried her hand at the more glamorous business of pop music, appearing with girl band Bewildered in the Olympia's 1998 pantomime, Rockin' Hood, and entering the 2000 National Song Contest with another pop band, Shimma, who weremanaged at the time by Louis Walsh.Since then, she has been completing her journalism degree at Dublin's Griffith College and it has been Georgina Ahern who has been the most visible of the two thanks to her relationship with Byrne. The two had been in the same class together, and began seeing each other while dad Bertie was but a lowly Minister for Finance.
However, having recently completed a business degree, Georgina has proven to have a business acumen that her father may wish to tap into. In 2001 she and Nicky sold the story of their relationship to OK! magazine for a reputed £100,000. They have since got engaged, and the sale of pictures of their summer wedding to a UK magazine is likely to be extremely lucrative.
What's as notable about the Ahern sisters as their success is how little we really know about them. They have rarely given interviews, and for all the speculation about their father's private life, they have never spoken about the effect their parents' separation has had on them.
"They may have made a deliberate decision," says Maura O'Kiely, "that they either go down that route or they don't, that once they open up on that subject then it'll be open season in the press." For Cecelia, the release of the book in the spring of 2004 will mean round after round of interviews, and the challenge of keeping that silence. "She will want to have good people around her during that time."
While Bertie will no doubt be very proud of his daughters, he may also be a little relieved. His counterparts across the water have not been so lucky. Tony Blair's 16-year-old son Euan hit the headlines when he was found drunk in Trafalgar Square, and George Bush Jr's daughter Jenna was arrested for underage drinking. The Ahern girls, by comparison, make for very tame copy.
"Maybe we would prefer if they were falling out of nightclubs," says O'Kiely.
So far they have managed their lives - and their finances - in a way that should make daddy proud. When Cecelia was making her panto debut, her dad quipped of her singing career: "you'd make a living a lot quicker than politics". As it has turned out, she's found an even better way than either of those.