Some personal news: I've written a book

Please excuse a shameless plug.

When you spend as much time around politicians as I do, you start to see them a little bit differently to people at home.

Yes, they're the people with the highest level of power in the country; they have a unique power to set the rules for the rest of us to live by, and so they deserve an elevated level of scrutiny. They all know that - it's the rules of engagement, and while they might sometimes dodge a question, they know that sometimes hard times are part of the job.

But you also start to recognise them as humans, and to see Leinster House as one of the country's toughest workplaces. The attention is inescapable; the demands are incessant; the learning curve can be insurmountable, and the stakes of the office politics are rarely so high. (Yes, contain your shock: politicians' workplaces have office politics!)

A little while ago I started wondering why some of them even do it. The outcome, is a book.

What is it like to run for election?

How do public representatives deal with the cut-throat competition from their rivals – and their own running mates?

How intense is the work?

What’s the Dáil bar really like?

Why are parliamentary party meetings so leaky?

What goes on behind closed doors at Cabinet meetings?

What do special advisers actually do?

And – most pertinently – why, given the almost constant abuse that now comes with the job, would anyone want to do it?

Those are the questions I'm trying to answer in The Secret Life of Leinster House, to be published by the great people at Gill Books this coming May, and available to preorder now.

It's the story of what politicians really want you to know about their working lives… and, what they'd rather you didn't.

Pre-order it now from Easons, Dubray, and Amazon – links to other outlets to follow soon!