The Taoiseach, a new political thriller by Peter Cunningham, was celebrated in Buswell's Hotel within a stone's throw of the Dáil this week.
"This is a book about who we are, it tells the kind of truths that we can only tell through the craft of fiction," said poet Theo Dorgan launching the book. "It's only through the kind of truths that novels like this tell that we can hope to come to know ourselves," he said. "We have lived through a most extraordinary 30 years, where the infant Republic was strangled by its own inheritors . . . where the smart boys were moving in on the money." The real triumph of this book is that "it takes on its subject in a fictionalised form. Peter made all this up," he said.
The book's main character is "hypnotic, charismatic, generous, ambitious, ruthless and scurrilous," said Cunningham.
Is this book about former Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey?
"It's a novel, so it's about someone called Henry Messenger," he said, "but," he continued, "obviously it arises from what went on in Ireland in the last 35 years . . . There have been no solicitors' letters but I have heard that there are a number of people who are very unhappy."
How did he feel about this fictional character now: "By the end of the book I liked him and disliked him in equal measure."
Friends who packed into the basement of Buswell's Hotel for the party included the writer's first cousin, Lord Mayor of Waterford, Tom Cunningham, as well as writers Maeve Binchy, Gordon Snell, Dick Warner, Vincent Banville, with his wife, Róisín, and poet Tony Curtis, whose latest collection, What Darkness Covers, was published recently. Another guest, director/producer Stephen Rooke, said his series, Heaven On Earth, which looks at the six main religions of the world through art and architecture, will be screened on TG4 in January, 2004. The six-part series, which is to be presented by Christy Kenneally, was shot in 14 countries and 36 different locations, he said.
The Taoiseach, by Peter Cunningham, is published by Hodder Headline Press