Gavan Reilly: Let me take you behind the scenes in Leinster House

This is, amazingly, my 336th column for the Meath Chronicle. (Don’t worry: it’s not my last!) A back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest that, in the seven-and-a-half years I’ve been writing it, I’ve written something approaching 400,000 words for these pages.

At some stage the penny dropped that if I was writing this much for the paper, I should at least do the honourable thing of trying to scrape some thoughts into something a bit long-form.

Lo and behold, 18 months ago I got an email from a publisher who wanted to pick my brains about any book ideas – and while the original idea wasn’t well defined in my head, we started talking casually about what it’s ‘really’ like behind the scenes in Leinster House; the byzantine backroom rules that new TDs have to learn their ways around, the office politics that gets in the way of getting stuff done, and how some of them feel so trapped in the system that they’re almost too scared to quit.

You can guess where this is going. One thing led to another and, this week, my second book will be available to pre-order. It’s called The Secret Life of Leinster House, and is being published by Gill Books in late May.

The premise is fairly simple: it’s what TDs would secretly like to tell you about how their jobs work… and, what they would rather you didn’t know.

The pre-order link goes live today (Wednesday 8th January) at linktr.ee/gavreilly