Memoir, like the man, gets right to the point

Unlike many other recent political memoirs, this book pulls few punches and is an authentic transcription of the acuity, caustic manners and occasional bias of the man, writes Gerard Howlin

Conduct Unbecoming: A Memoir by Des O’Malley, a collation of “mere impressions, not history”, is like its author pungent and to the point. O’Malley was infamously expelled by Fianna Fáil for ‘conduct unbecoming’ in the aftermath of his ‘I stand by the Republic’ speech.

Already excluded from the parliamentary party, he refused to follow Charlie Haughey in voting against then health minister Barry Desmond’s liberalisation of contraception in 1985. Haughey who cast him out, lived on, never to secure an overall majority and eventually only to be in government at all, in coalition with O’Malley and his Progressive Democrats. That famous speech was both the author’s call for a liberal republic and philosophically the basis for the PDs.