Fidelma Healy Eames remembers her first day in the Seanad in 2007 well, and an encounter with a fellow female politician. “I walked in the gates of Leinster House,” she says, “and she said, on the very first day, ‘Are you ready for the next general election?’. I’d just arrived. But that’s the problem with politics, you’re never there. I’ve shifted now to my own way of looking at things. I’ve moved from achievement to fulfilment. I really believe that we have to say that all we have is now.”
THE former chief medical offficer who saw Ireland through the worst of the pandemic will launch a newly published book of poems by pupils in Scoil na Maighdine Mhuire, Newmarket-on-Fergus this Tuesday.