This was the standard line delivered by Terry Keane at parties and receptions: "I am the most powerful woman in Ireland - the wife of a High Court judge and the mistress of a taoiseach". Her hobbies, as listed in Who's Who in Ireland, include "living, loving, the corridors of power". She was never shy about her now infamous liaison with Charles J. Haughey. It seems that if she met a stranger at traffic lights they were treated to details of their affair. Readers of her column in the Sunday Independent, were regularly fed little vignettes involving "Sweetie" - which made the occasional response of shock and dismay this week all the more surprising.
Keane adores being the centre of attention, as this week's carefully drawn performance has most definitely shown. Since her doe-eyed appearance on the Late Late Show last Friday, the nation has been convulsed by her revelations of her 27-year affair. The shock is mixed with anger about her utter disdain for Maureen Haughey. While the latter has always maintained a quiet dignity, Keane has been loud, blousy, and troublesome. Charlie's angel has travelled a long way.
There was no shortage of people lining up to give their tuppenceworth on the former taoiseach's mistress for the purposes of this profile. Few of the anecdotes flattered her, painting a picture of a selfish, self-serving, over-indulgent woman who cared a great deal about money and status and very little for anyone who got in her way.
Ann Teresa O'Donnell was born in Guildford, Surrey in 1939. Her parents Tim O'Donnell, a doctor, and her mother Ann, a bank official, were Irish. As a young child during the second World War she was sent to Ireland. When she returned home she was installed in a boarding school in Devon. An only child, she described her upbringing as "very Catholic". Returning to Ireland in her late teens she was accepted at Trinity College to study medicine. As a student, she became pregnant and put the baby up for adoption. She has since been reunited with that daughter, Jane, and many people expect that she is going to reveal the name of Jane's father this Sunday - he is believed to be an actor.
She never finished her degree. She subsequently met and married Ronan Keane, now a Supreme Court judge. The couple began married life in a flat in Merrion Square. From there they moved to St Mary's in Killiney, before buying a large Georgian house in Leeson Street, where she entertained on a grand scale. They had three children - Madeleine, Timothy and Justine. She now lives in Ranelagh.
In the early days, when Ronan Keane was a struggling young barrister, she worked as a freelance journalist, writing about fashion and the social scene. She got a job in The Irish Times as a fashion writer, before moving in the late 1960s to the Sunday Press. The marriage soon ran into difficulties.
Keane has made and lost many friends over the years. "Terry is never happy unless she is not talking to one of her friends," said one former friend this week. A number remain loyal to her and feel she has drawn unfair criticism this week in the newspapers and on talkshows. They speak of her charm and wit, and say she is capable of being very kind. This week she went to ground, to Kerry, apparently, and efforts to contact her have proved fruitless.
Most who know her agree that her affection for Charlie Haughey, and his for her, was real and lasting, although one friend said pointedly that she had never in her life had an affair with either "a poor man or a powerless man".
One of her friends who would allow her name to be used is fashion doyenne Ruth Kelly, who ran in the same set as Keane in the 1970s and 1980s when both were fashion writers. She believes Keane has been given a rough deal this week, particularly on the radio. "No mistress is responsible for where her master's money comes from. She is being pilloried for the things that he did. Of course we all knew about the affair with Charlie - but you don't grass on your mates."
The names of other men in Terry Keane's life were being bandied about all week. But it was the affair with Charlie, and the excesses involved, for which she will always be remembered. The lunches in Le Coq Hardi costing hundreds of pounds are the stuff of legend, as are the trysts in Sean Kinsella's Mirabeau in Sandycove. Thornton's was a more contemporary meeting place. The pair liked to travel. The relationship was tempestuous but those who spent time in their company said they were tactile and affectionate. "The term `sweetie' does mean something. They were intimate."
Friends holidaying with Terry Keane in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry talk of her being whisked off in what they said was an Aer Corps helicopter to his Inishvickillane retreat. When she was travelling to Paris for fashion week, a call would be put in to President Mitterrand's office ensuring that she would be seated in the front row at fashion shows.
The affair began in early 1972. According to many sources her affection for him has endured; however it has not been exclusive. One night she was dining in a Dublin restaurant with former diplomat Robin Fogarty, now deceased. Charlie walked in unexpectedly with two friends. He walked over to the table and complimented Mrs Keane on her dress. She replied that he had given it to her and as she did so, Charlie tipped her plate onto her lap and left. Terry, who had been drinking, began to cry and her companion brought her home. She is said to have arrived at Fogarty's house one night wearing a mink coat with nothing on underneath. His friendship with Keane is seen as one of the reasons why his career in the foreign service did not flourish. The former Minister for Education, Donogh O'Malley, was also a friend.
Terry Keane was very proud of her connection with Charlie. She used to tell a story of how the H-block hunger strikers had used her as a conduit to send messages to Charlie. The Taoiseach, she said, was furious with the protest because it upset his relationship with Margaret Thatcher. She was unashamed in using her connection to her advantage. That included boasting about it to gardai, on occasions when they warned her against getting into her car and driving while drunk. It eventually caught up with her. In 1982 she was disqualified from driving after she was convicted of drunk driving. SPEAKING with some affection about her - "she was a good friend in times of need" - Ruth Kelly mentions Keane's wonderfully fast wit. "We were at a fashion show in a Dublin hotel. I was wearing a secondhand dress that had once belonged to one of the Kennedy women. I was thrilled with myself - it was all jewels and glitter - and I thought I looked fabulous. There was a queue at the door so Keane suggested that we go through the kitchen. Someone asked if we might get stopped and Keane quickly responded: `Not when they see that we have the Queen Mother with us and she's wearing the crown jewels'."
Kelly had advised her against doing the Keane Edge column. "She had no editorial control over the column. She sold her name. As a journalist that is all she had. I told her not to do it."
Dick Walsh, assistant editor of The Irish Times and married to Ruth Kelly, has a different view. "She was witty, dismissive, class-conscious and self-centred to an extraordinary degree. She flicked her fingers at waiters, shouted at gardai when they tried to prevent her from driving. She was indifferent to people outside herself and her own circle . . . She asked me why I wrote about Haughey as I did and I mentioned his hypocrisy on divorce. She dismissed that. I wanted to write about the affair in The Irish Times but was told that I had no proof and that it would be hurtful to Mrs Haughey. How it could be more hurtful than the hypocrisy I don't know."
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s she travelled in a pack with the other female fashion journalists. A newcomer on the scene remembers her shock at some of the antics she witnessed at her first fashion show: "Terry was quaffing champagne, one leg held high in the air, saying how much Charlie loved her legs."
A Keane observer of the time said that the unique thing about Terry was that she could "live through one of the most exciting, intellectually argumentative times of recent years and remain untouched, uninfluenced, uninvolved in any of it. She could bear to be a fashion correspondent for 30 years. Plus there aren't many women around who are semi-kept - bejewelled on the bounty of a kept man."