Family, friends and politicians bade a final farewell to PJ Mara yesterday as the former government press secretary was laid to rest in Co Galway.

PJ Mara was the most famous political spin doctor in modern Irish history, having played a leading role in Fianna Fáil for more than 30 years.

The day I met PJ Mara we were both green and looking a little lost. I had been sent by a newspaper in Dublin to cover an event in the offices of the Construction Industry Federation. I stepped out of a lift to be met by Mr Mara.

PJ Mara, the flamboyant former government press secretary, will be buried in Kinvara Co Galway tomorrow beside his late wife.

When PJ Mara resigned as Fianna Fáil director of elections for the Nice Treaty referendum in 2002 after adverse findings against him in the Flood Tribunal, it looked like he might be departing the political scene for good.

The entire country went a little bit sports-mad this summer, so it comes as no surprise to hear Rugby World Cup 2015 is the phrase people in Ireland searched online for the most this year.

Enda Kenny has promised Fine Gael will outline a fully costed five-year economic plan for his party’s election campaign and pledged to reduce unemployment to 6%.

HAD Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman Michael McGrath suggested a decade or two ago, even during an emotional, off-guard moment at one of his party’s lively sleepovers, that the party might have to contemplate being a junior coalition partner he would have been taken aside by a fatherly figure, PJ Mara maybe, and told firmly to keep his dangerous, defeatist ideas to himself. Mr McGrath would have felt the steel in the velvet glove on his collar.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, then satire is the scimitar of political pomposity, argues Rita de Brún.

An unhealthy culture of secrecy surrounds our civil servants despite the fact they are a valuable source of historical information, writes Ryle Dwyer

RTÉ drama, Charlie, about the political career of Charles Haughey, has rewritten history with dramatic licence by showing the former taoiseach resigning not so much because of revelations over the phone-tapping scandal of a decade earlier but because of a threat that the full truth of his involvement in the 1970 arms crisis would be made public, suggests Caroline O'Doherty.

Actor Aidan Gillen has said he tried not to pass judgement on Charles Haughey when playing the controversial taoiseach in RTÉ’s upcoming mini-series, Charlie.

Fianna Fáil officials are staying quiet over claims that one of the party’s best-known spin doctors, PJ Mara, could be set to head its general election campaign.

As crime boss Nidge in Love/Hate, Tom Vaughan Lawlor hasn’t flinched from dispatching his enemies, and soon he’ll be playing another character who knows where the bodies are buried.

RTÉ One have released their autumn/winter schedule and Imelda May is getting her own show!

As Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane ride in as the FAI’s new sheriff and deputy, Dave Kenny looks at some other memorable good cop/bad cop pairings from the archives, or should that be ‘bad cop/bad bad cop’?

Michael Clifford (Opinion, Nov 4) expounds freely (and accurately) on the debilitating legacy that haunts the ‘bould Bertie, long after his deserved demise in a whirlpool of shame.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL was in Dublin last week, flogging a book, revisiting the past, and standing by an old pal.

POLITICS is rock ’n’ roll for the ugly, and the shucksters, bounders and bumpkins who hang about in Leinster House are a motley crew.

Littlefinger as Charlie Haughey? Nidge as Mara? How we scoffed. But we scoff no more…

Charles Haughey’s former press secretary believes the revelation he was having an affair was the “most painful moment” for the former Taoiseach.

ONE of the most striking things about Eamon Dunphy’s upbringing in Drumcondra, on Dublin’s northside, was the love his parents had for each other.

The life of Charles Haughey, the politician so many people love to hate, is to be dramatised starring actors from the country’s latest hit crime drama.

THE new political season kicked off in earnest yesterday, after Taoiseach Enda Kenny firmly rejected a stinging attack from Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin who accused Mr Kenny of operating an “uno duce, una voce” dictatorial style of leadership.

READING a biography of someone you met many times both professionally and socially is an interesting experience. Will the book reveal things about its subject that you didn’t know?

Former government spin doctor PJ Mara has spoken for the first time about his baby and how the recent birth has changed his life after becoming a father again at 71.

Voters will reject Enda Kenny’s bid to abolish the Seanad and will give the Government a “kick in the arse” in October’s referendum, according to ex-government spin doctor PJ Mara.

A banking inquiry would absolve Fianna Fáil of the blame for the financial crash and boost the party’s image ahead of elections, according to former government spin doctor PJ Mara.

STEPPING across the threshold of PJ Mara’s home in leafy Ballsbridge, Dublin, you feel a certain dread that you’re about to be ripped apart as a journalist.

Simon Cowell, the man, who had always said he was “too selfish’’ to have children, is apparently going to become a daddy at the age of 53. No wonder he is “freaked out’’ by the news.

THE debate about abolishing the Seanad reminds me of the Groucho Marx line: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

SPARE a thought for the Andrews clan, whose next family get-together is bound to be a frosty affair after one of its disgruntled scions was revealed as the poison pen behind an anonymous Twitter account.

Necks stretched and muffled whispers filled courtroom number one as a smartly dressed ex-banker was brought up from a holding cell.

Joan Burton, the social protection minister, has raised questions about Government members interacting with individuals criticised by tribunals following the appearance of Enda Kenny at a public event with businessman Denis O’Brien.