When I’m working and especially when the Dáil is sitting and it is doubly busy, I really enjoy a good story that gives my mind a break. In the last few weeks I’ve read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, both beautiful stories with very strong women and a certain sadness.

I have two copies of Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in different parts of my house, which I pick up and read between books. That and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. They are both big compelling stories about great American political battles.

On one of my last foreign holidays pre-Covid, I read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and it scared the monkies out of me as I sat by the pool.

My favourite book to date is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie which I read when I was 22 and travelling in Istanbul and Barcelona, living on white rice and coffee and very happy. Midnight’s Children is an extraordinary tale of India’s independence and the story of one particular child born just at the moment of independence.

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