36 Terry Keane

In the opening chapter of The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics, Breandán Ó hEithir quoted a doughty Cork blacksmith, on the day after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, responding to his parish priest’s assurance that ‘We’re going to have our own gentry now’, with a spirited ‘We will in our arse have our own gentry’.

The Keane Edge was perhaps independent Ireland’s most determined effort to prove him wrong. Through the early years of the Celtic Tiger, this gossip column on the back of the lifestyle section of the Sunday Independent, with its snippets about the rich and famous, sought to insinuate a new social hierarchy in a nation no longer sure where it should draw its values from. Judging by the Keane Edge, money, glamour, celebrity and brass neck became the most visible characteristics of social significance in this new Ireland.

Terry Keane, because she was ‘known’ to be conducting a long-term affair with Charles Haughey, was the perfect frontperson for this showcase of Ireland’s emerging ‘gentry’. The facts of this affair were ‘known’ in much the way people ‘know’ about such things in small towns – it was common currency without ever being openly stated. It was hinted at, then denied, again let slip and again withdrawn. Terry Keane was the wife of a man who had been appointed a senior judge by Haughey himself. It was all too fantastic for an Ireland raised on the Catechism to grapple with.

In the 1990s, this became a meal ticket for Terry Keane, after she moved from the Sunday Press, where she had been a lightweight feature writer, to become a high-profile gossip columnist with the Sunday Independent. The persistent innuendos about Haughey gave her a cachet nobody else could touch, and she was, by all accounts, paid as much for this connection as for any writing talent she possessed.

Keane’s relationship with Haughey became the subject of persistent references and innuendos in the Keane Edge. There would be mentions of weekends in Paris with this unnamed ‘Sweetie’, or allusions, so barefaced as to seem implausible in their obvious implication, to ‘my Charlie’. It was all exceedingly arch and therefore both titillating and deniable.

In May 1999, Terry Keane moved from the Sunday Independent to the Sunday Times in a deal which involved her writing three initial articles about her long-time romantic relationship with Charles Haughey and thereafter a gossip column for two years. She received £65,000 for the three initial articles and £50,000 per annum for the next two years. These three articles, based on her putative forthcoming memoirs, were published on three successive Sundays that May.

In advance of publication of the first instalment, Keane went on The Late Late Show, for the penultimate show of Gay Byrne’s lengthy tenure, and spilled the beans on her relationship with CJH.

In a fourth, apparently unscheduled piece on 6 June, Keane responded to critics and dealt with the history of her infamous Sunday Independent column. She had left the Sunday Independent without notice and there was now clearly bad blood between herself and editor Aengus Fanning and his deputy editor Anne Harris. Fanning had been quoted in his own newspaper as saying: ‘She was happy to take our money while making no contribution. Her work rate had declined dramatically in the last two years.’ Gradually it emerged that Keane had just been one of a team of journalists contributing to the column that bore her name.

The Sunday Times’ front page lead that morning was entitled ‘Bono story my worst mistake says Terry Keane’. This referred to a notorious Keane Edge story which revealed the sex of one of Bono’s children on the basis of information leaked from the maternity hospital before Bono himself had been told. In this interview, Keane apologized for the episode, describing it as ‘the most indefensible thing I ever did’.

‘I was not aware of the story before it was published and when I saw it I was shocked. I should have resigned there and then. It was my worst mistake and my bitterest regret.’

She described the Keane Edge column as ‘poisonous’, claiming it had been mostly written by other people under the guidance of Anne Harris. Harris, she said, was ‘undoubtedly the cleverest woman I have met. She knew exactly what the readership wanted and however much people used to berate the column, there was no doubt they read it and the circulation soared. I just wish she had used her own name and not mine.

‘The Keane Edge gave the impression that I was the sole author, but at any one time, a minimum of five people worked on the column, usually six or seven.

‘There is just one burning regret in my fifty-nine years – the hurt and damage I caused to people through the Keane Edge . . . I should have stopped sooner and walked away. Quite simply, I needed the money. Despite the apparent glamour of my life, I have always been financially insecure.

‘At the beginning, even though it was written in a very bitchy style, the Keane Edge was not intrusive. Gradually it changed direction. I was partly responsible for that and therefore I take part of the blame. Part, but not all.

‘When it started to go too far and I became uncomfortable with it, I was always assured by my superiors that the readers knew the Terry Keane of the Keane Edge was a fantasy character, not the real me. I could see their point. I doubt that readers took it at face value that I was constantly on the phone to Warren Beatty and Brad Pitt, and that I was the world’s most stunning and irresistible redhead sex bomb. So reassured, my disquiet would evaporate.’

In the same edition, the Sunday Times carried an interview with Terry Keane by another ST journalist, which claimed that Keane had been devastated by the hostile responses to her Sunday Times revelations. ‘It has been like having one’s eyeballs sliced through with razor blades. But this too shall pass.’

Asked how she could have been unaware of the pain and damage inflicted by the Keane Edge, she replied: ‘It seems to me that I must have been living in a different world. The vehemence with which people react to the Keane Edge . . . shocks me. The fact that I’m unaware of that revulsion means either that I am very dim or completely amoral. That frightens me, as I don’t think I’m dim.’

In a way, the Keane Edge was like a cultural weathervane, rendering visible the implicit facts of the Celtic Tiger years. Nothing about it, not even the identity of its author, was authentic, and it therefore, in retrospect, acquired the status of metaphor. It was something the Irish public was drawn to, and while they laughed at much of what it contained, they envied, too, the lifestyles depicted there. It invested them with a kind of idealism that fed, in turn, the lesser desires of more humble ambitions. In this, it became a central element of the delusion that enveloped the country in those years. Terry Keane may not have written much of it, but her persona was certainly the grit around which this pearl of pretension and vanity was formed. Her life and personality came to represent, in those years, the idea of classiness, chutzpah and style. Like many things about that Ireland, the Keane Edge was not the product of one mind, nor even of all the minds that contributed to it. In a way, it was the product of an entire society running away with itself, of readers as much as journalists, wannabe celebrities and publicity seekers. And it seemed, in the end, entirely appropriate that the woman named as the author was ‘only doing it for the money’.