WHEN Marese O'Shea decided to open an "exclusive" escort agency in Dublin in 1990, she knew she had nothing to fear but the gardai and the Sunday World. So she announced her intention at a Garda station where she had had dealings. "Nothing was asked or said," she says. The Sunday World's response was to produce an article about Marese's new venture which had clients ringing her within days.
Over the next year or two, Marese revolutionised the Irish practice of prostitution, taking what she had learned in New York as a thousand-dollar-a-night escort girl and translating it to the hotels and exclusive apartment buildings of Dublin.
She organised Christmas parties, stag parties, toyboys for women (Eurostuds) and a countrywide service for rural-dwellers, all the while getting plenty of free publicity.
Articulate and raised in upper- middle-class surroundings, Marese attracted a "VIP" clientele including politicians and media personalities. Thirty years old and a prostitute since the age of 18, she had, she says, already enjoyed long-term relationships with an Irish politician, who is still active in politics, and with an internationally famous rock star based in Dublin. She refuses to name them.
The rock star she has sympathy for, since she claims he was too famous to be able to meet women in the normal way. Politicians have - fairly, it seems - earned her scorn: "Their hypocrisy sickens me."
When Marese began Exclusive Escorts, politicians and punters alike were having sex with prostitutes on the streets and in cars: "It was really crazy the risks these really well-known guys would take." The prostitutes, meanwhile, were subject to exploitation and abuse.
Exclusive Escorts would use only "high-class" girls who had their own apartments. To protect these "goodtime girls", no client would be entertained unless he gave his real name and credit card number. The cost would be £150 for the introduction (£50 for Marese and £100 for the girl) plus £500 lord the night, which the girls kept. Clients were told the fees were purely for companionship, not for sex. Any arrangement for sex was strictly between the girl and the client.
By 1992, Marese had a coded list of 6,000 client names on her computer file - and she still has them. The 75 women on her books fitted in so well at the top hotels, the golfing outings, the expensive restaurants and the Spanish and Caribbean resorts that when the customers met them first "the men wouldn't even know that they were callgirls".
One was a top model; another a Foxrock housewife who received clients at home when her husband was away on business. Irish men, like the Europeans and Americans who also used Marese's agency. increasingly wanted independent, educated women who seemed successful and in control.
It sounds glamorous, like Pretty Woman or an Irish version of the Heidi Fleiss story, but for Marese it was all an illusion and she is the first to admit it wasn't glamorous at all. By 1994, she was penniless, working the streets and a slave to heroin. Her demons had won the day.
For running parallel to the story of goodtime girl Marese O'Shea is the story of Louise Finn, adopted as a baby by a woman she did not have a good relationship with. Louise did feel loved by her father, who suffered from diabetes and went blind when she was seven. While Louise's mother struggled to maintain the family's upper-middle-class lifestyle by running a Montessori school, Louise was left at home with her father.
Louise's lather died when she was 15. She drank heavily, had a breakdown and, when she was 16, spent the summer in a psychiatric hospital. There, her 16-year dependency on drugs began.
She left her private secondary school. By the age of 18, she had a daughter of her own and drifted almost unconsciously to Mount Street for her first £5 encounter, then got a job in a massage parlour earning £5 for topless, £10 for a strip. When the owner of a massage parlour where she worked was prosecuted, she had to take the witness box and "Louise Finn" was named in the newspapers. "From then on I had nothing to lose," she says.
By the time she was 32, in 1992, she was earning a fortune as Marese O'Shea of Exclusive Escorts. She never saved a penny, preferring to spend it on extensions to her adopted mother's house, a cocaine habit and £200 bottles of vintage champagne.
Around this time, she found her birth mother - and thus began the descent which nearly killed her. When her birth mother rejected her, she filled her need for a biological connection by having a destructive relationship with her cousin, her birth-mother's nephew. She was soon back on heroin and working the streets to support her own habit and her lover's at a cost of £450 per day.
The Coolmine Therapeutic Community saved her life, made her face her suppressed childhood memories and led her to discover that "all my problems began the moment of my birth, when my mother rejected me". Coolmine also encouraged her to write her book.
Bidding is now going on for the movie rights and Marese hopes to get enough to live on for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, she is being financially supported by "a friend". There is, she stresses, only one friend. Despite what she says in her book, she has since resolved to never again be involved in prostitution.