Eoghan Murphy:  ‘I was thinking, Oh God, this is exactly what I didn’t want, to be back in the public eye’

The former minister reflects on political failure

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Eoghan Murphy became a Fine Gael TD in 2011. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times.
Eoghan Murphy became a Fine Gael TD in 2011. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times.

Eoghan Murphy’s political memoir Running From Office was published just as the 2024 general election was called. The timing was coincidental, insists the former Minister for Housing on today’s Inside Politics podcast.

“People around me, some were saying this is great timing because it’s an election. And others were saying, this isn’t good timing because it’s an election. Because one thing I didn’t want to happen was for the book to be weaponised in a way that was political, which the book tries not to be: party political”.

In spite of that the book briefly became an election campaign issue, with Fine Gael’s opponents pointing to a passage that suggested housing was not the government’s number one priority while he was in office.

“I was thinking, Oh God, this is exactly what I didn’t want, was to be back in the public eye”, he tells Hugh Linehan on today’s Inside Politics podcast.

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On the podcast Eoghan discusses his time in office, why he “failed the test” of a senior ministerial position and what governing looks like from the inside.