The Boss by Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh Poolbeg Press 400 pp, price £7.99
The importance of The Boss was clear from the moment of its publication, in October 1983. Re-issued 14 years later, without revision or correction but with a foreword by John Bowman and an echoing introduction by the authors, it's still by a long chalk the best book about modern Irish politics.
What was so important about it in 1983 was that, less than a year after the ignominious departure of Charles Haughey's GUBU government, it described its career in damning and incontrovertible detail. Almost all of the main characters were still active in politics and could have contradicted Joyce and Murtagh. None did.
The Boss himself was true to form: "I don't think," he said, "you can even justify that partic'lar publication with the title `book'." His first response to criticism, as Bowman notes, had always followed Bart Simpson's line: "I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything." And, what with the laws of libel and his refusal to put anything in writing, proof was hard to come by.
But not impossible: Joyce and Murtagh hadn't tried to tackle him head-on; they had assembled their evidence line by line and, crafty as weavers, stitched it into a narrative that read like a thriller. (Look closely and you'll see the bones of two fine novels here.) They had beaten both the laws of libel and the refusal of many to accept the portrait that had been darkening in the attic all along.
Of course, The Boss didn't force immediate change, either in Fianna Fail or in public life. But it raised hares; and some of them are running still.
Echoes. The telephone calls to Aras an Uachtarain in 1982 helped to put paid to Brian Lenihan's chances in the last Presidential election. The fact that Mr Haughey knew all about the tapping of journalists' telephones in 1982, as Sean Doherty explained in his Nighthawks interview, was the final straw for a bewildered party and its exasperated PD partners in 1992.
But what destroyed the Boss and brings this story up to date is the way in which one of the constant rumours of the early 1980s turned out to be true - about his wealth and the secret of his dependence on benefactors in the shadows. Things were worse than his most critical opponents imagined.
This is a book for those too young to remember when GUBU struck; and a reminder for those who'd prefer to forget what it was like when Mr Haughey ruled the roost and his supporters, in politics, business and journalism, refused - for reasons of selfishness, cowardice or convenience - to look at the reality which stared them in the face.