"I'm not even wearing underpants"

1 When he was still a senator, the legendary Donie Cassidy once voted commando. Called from his bed to the house in the wee hours, he arrived to breathlessly tell impatient colleagues: “I came straight over. I’m not even wearing underpants!”

2 Former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald explains how he was finally, brought to book: “I used to go into the Dail and use the library a lot. One day a librarian saw me leaving with some volumes and she said ‘ex-TDs can’t take books out’. So that was the end of that.”

3 When Clare psychiatrist Moosajee Bhamjee was surprisingly elected in 1992, his family in South Africa were aghast. His mother told him: “I didn’t bring you up to be a politician. I brought you up to be a doctor.”

4 In her first electoral campaign in 1977, Mary Harney was armed with a 40 quid donation from her parents, a bicycle and a hazy notion of the constituency boundaries. Years later, Michael McDowell revealed that, at the height of the campaign, he had seen her canvassing the side of a street that was actually in the neighbouring constituency.

5 The late Labour legend Frank Cluskey was no fan of the constituency clinic. He once said: “A third of the people who turn up at clinics want you to do something that’s fuckin’ impossible. Another third want you to do something that’s fuckin’ illegal. And the rest of them are only fuckin’ lonely.”

6 Ever since Cork East TD Gerry Crowley introduced a surprised Jack Lynch to the concept of “fortified coffee”, a cup of the black stuff with a shot of whiskey known in the Dail Bar as “a Mallow”.

7 Former Dail Superintendent Eamon O’ Donogue was no fan of the political Christmas parties which, the morning after, resulted in puddles of vomit in the bar, the toilets and along the corridors. “The Fianna Fail parties were just desperate,” he says. “Outrageous. It was like an office party gone mad.”

8 When Tony Gregory caused controversy by declining to wear a tie upon entering the house as a first-time TD, the then Ceann Comhairle, the FF deputy Dr John O’ Connell, told him: “I don’t give a fuck if you come in the nude as long as you vote for Charlie.”

9 Miraculously, Kerry’s own Jackie Healy-Rae hasn’t grown a beard because, according to his own testimony, as one of four independents elected in 1997, he “never bought a razor in Dublin in those five years because I wasn’t able to go to the shops. I was on call all the time. We were there for every single vote.”

10 After what she calls the “nightmare” of the 1997 general election for the Progressive Democrats, Mary Harney received a surprise housecall: “The doorbell rang and it was Jonathan Philbin Bowman with a beautiful bunch of flowers – lillies – and a bottle of wine or something. I thought it was a lovely gesture. He wasn’t even looking for a story. Those are the things you remember.”

Extracts adapted from The Naked Politician, the acclaimed new book on the realities of Irish political life, by journalist and broadcaster Katie Hannon. Published by Gill and Macmillan, the book is in the shops now