New book on the Longford entrepreneur who became Taoiseach

By the time Conor Lenihan was born, in 1963, Albert Reynolds was flying high as a 30-year-old entrepreneur. The dancehall business he had developed with his brother Jim was thriving, allowing him to give up his day job with CIÉ.

He had just married Kathleen and the fact that he could take her on a honeymoon to Majorca, and purchase their substantial home in Longford without a mortgage, was indicative of the wealth he was amassing from the dancehall trade.

An account of the future Taoiseach's years in business, which also included purchasing the Longford News newspaper and setting up the pet food company C&D Foods, forms part of Conor Lenihan's engaging biography, Albert Reynolds: Risktaker for Peace, which was published last month by Merrion Press.

This is the author's second book about a former Taoiseach, after his bestselling Haughey: Prince of Power was published in 2015.

Conor, who previously served as a Fianna Fáil TD and Junior Minister, spent a good part of his childhood in Athlone.

He grew up in the Retreat area until the age of eight, when his family moved to Dublin. Despite the move to the capital in the early '70s, his father, Brian Lenihan Sr, continued to represent the Roscommon-Leitrim constituency in the Dáil.

"I have great memories of my time in Athlone. My grandfather lived there, in a big house called Ardagh Court (across the road from Our Lady's Bower)," Conor explained.

"So, after I left, at the age of eight, I would go down every summer and stay with my grandfather in Retreat. I spent all my summers there into my teens.

"I played in the soccer street leagues in the town when I was younger, which was great fun, and when the weather was good you could cycle out to Coosan or to Hodson Bay."

The back cover of the new book includes an endorsement from his aunt, Mary O'Rourke, who describes it as: "A great read, packed full of facts and action hitherto unknown about Albert Reynolds."

A review in The Irish Times was similarly enthusiastic, describing the biography as a "genuinely compelling portrait" of the Longford man.

Speaking to the Westmeath Independent, Conor explained that he had first been approached about writing a book on Reynolds while he was a journalist covering the then-Taoiseach in the early '90s.

"At that time I decided I was too close to the action. I was a reporter covering him and I felt it wasn't the right thing to do, it was too early," he said.

"The book is really a full biography, covering his early days, his business and political life, and afterwards when he ceased being Taoiseach and what he did after that. So it's the first full biography of him to be published."

As a journalist, Conor wrote for the Irish News newspaper and reported on radio for Ireland Radio News (IRN) and 98fm. He would regularly meet with Reynolds, at events and announcements, and became friendly with him.

"He was a great person to cover because he was very frank and candid. He rarely declaimed or bluffed on subjects that he didn't know anything about, so the time you spent with him was always good value.

"He had huge energy as well. There was obviously a culture in my father's time in politics, right up to my own time, of a lot of heavy drinking, but Albert was a teetotaller so he always had his wits about him."

Albert Reynolds died in 2014 and his wife Kathleen sadly passed away in May of this year.

When asked to assess Reynolds' legacy as a political leader, Conor said he had been hugely effective during his time in Government.

"I think he's up there with Lemass in terms of effectiveness," he said.

"I think he put up more air miles than any other Taoiseach in terms of getting out to the United States and the Far East, promoting Ireland as a location in which to invest. He was very passionate about that.

"One of the great things he was involved in was the setting up of the Irish American economic advisory council, which was a council of very senior business people in the US with an interest in Ireland.

"His business networking skills made such a huge difference. He had three key relationships fully under his control, in a sense. Those were; the Irish-American dimension, the British dimension with John Major, and then the extraordinary covert and under-the-radar contact with both loyalist and the IRA paramilitaries.

"This is something that I don't think anybody before him or since could ever have pulled off. His listening skills were extraordinary and he had this wide-eyed look and friendly disposition which led people to tell him things.

"He had this demeanour he could employ to subtly co-opt people into his world or orbit."

Having now written books about Haughey and Reynolds, he said he wouldn't rule out tackling Bertie Ahern's career at some stage, but added he might also consider writing biographies of other Taoisigh such as Jack Lynch, Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton.

Conor, who divides his time between Ireland and the UK, currently works in business as an investment professional. "I worked with a Russian oligarch for a number of years raising money and investing," he said.

"I work for company owners to raise money, or plan a business development campaign with a kind of international dimension to it. I've also been involved with owners when they're acquiring companies or disposing of companies."

He said the pandemic had led to the cancellation of a lot of business plans with which he had been involved, but it had the benefit of giving him time to write this book.

"I interviewed over 30 people for it, but that process was made a lot easier because of Covid. It sped the whole thing up. Before you would have met people in person and sat with them whereas, with Covid, people consented to doing interviews over the phone.

"The opportunity to get this book written swiftly was very much helped by that," he said.

* 'Albert Reynolds: Risktaker for Peace' by Conor Lenihan, published by Merrion Press, is out now.