“The important thing is to stay open to life. The great thing about being old is that you are free. You have time, and yes, I have a pension. If you don’t have one, start one now.

“One key thing about being old is your health and you can’t ignore it. It’s all about maintenance. If you can maintain your health, it’s an adventure.”

We’re talking as McManus launches her third novel, When Things Come to Light. Once she retired from politics, she signed up to do a master’s in creative writing in Trinity.

Out of that came her second novel The Shadow in the Yard (her first, Acts of Subversion, was published in 1991, before her political career started). And now, she’s in the throes of a PhD at the University of Limerick with Joseph O’Connor as her tutor.

​Writing was always part of her DNA. Once upon a time she was a journalist, doing a weekly family-themed column. She had plenty of material with her four children. She used to joke that she had pre-menstrual tension each week before the deadline.

Then the writer Clare Boylan advised her that she if she wanted to be taken seriously, she needed to write a novel. McManus started down the path of fiction, meeting up with a women’s writing group, got published and, all these years later, she is still with them.

​“I wanted to write this book because I became a grandmother,” she says. “I get such joy out of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and I realised that this is a link that my grandparents lost.”

She loves stories and finding out what makes the world tick. At the moment she’s writing a series of stories extending over 100 years of Irish Independence.

“I’m exploring Irish history, which I was never all that familiar with. Because of my politics, I knew all about the Russian Revolution but I didn’t know an awful lot about the Irish Revolution.”

The story which excites her most is the one which inspired When Things Come to Light. It comes from the tale of her grandparents.

“I’ve always been conscious that my mother was a Protestant and my father was a Catholic. My mother hardly ever talked about her childhood. We were reared as Catholics. The narrative at school was that we should really be trying to convert Protestants. It was propaganda.

“In my innocence, I thought the story of my family was my mother’s family didn’t want her marrying a Catholic, so they fell out and there was no contact with them. Then I grew up and learned about Unitarians and how they are free-thinkers.

“In fact my mother was never baptised, on the basis that if you are going to choose a religion, you should choose it yourself.

“As far as I could see, my grandmother had a temper and clashed with my mother because the idea that her grandchildren should be forced and educated in Catholicism whether they wanted it or not was anathema to someone who was Unitarian, because they were extremely tolerant.”

While she is fascinated by discovering this past, she is rueful about it too.

“I never knew my mother’s parents and they died when I was 20,” she says.

The enormity of it hits her all the more as she sees the new generations in her own family. But it’s onwards and upwards, so she has turned it all into art.

“I can’t relive the past but I decided to rediscover my grandparents by writing about them. The novel is about two young people who meet in the Unitarian Church and head out to India.”

​Liz’s own life story would make a book or two as well. And when she tells me about her various lives, there is always laughter there. She sees the funny side of her innocence and disasters.

As a little girl, she was shy and as the youngest of three girls, her parents gave her the nickname “Anxious Annie”.

Did the anxiety stay with her?

“When I became a TD I stopped worrying, which was just as well. I was 43. But I still have a touch of being anxious – catastrophising. I think that all grandmothers do.”

Liz was born in Montreal and the family moved around a lot as her father was a civil servant, working in aviation.

“When I was eight, we went to live in Holland for a year-and-a-half. I remember skating on the canals. I went to a Dutch-speaking school and learned the language very quickly, as children do, but I forgot it very quickly when we came back. I was very young when I left school – 16,” she says.

She started off studying fashion design in the Grafton Academy, on the advice of her mother.

“It was useful because I learnt to make clothes but I was pretty awful at it,” she says cheerfully.

When that didn’t work out, she followed her mother’s next instruction – to study architecture.

“In those days parents made decisions for you. There was no career guidance,” she says.

She laughs at the shock of realising she had to design buildings. She thought she was going to study the history of architecture. However, she was bright and she qualified. For almost a decade she worked as an architect, including working for a spell in Derry. Her time there ignited her passion for politics.

“It was a deeply divided society and the Bogside was a very poor part of Northern Ireland, but socialism was the ideology that could bind people together. It dealt with issues that I felt were important – poverty, joblessness and homelessness.”

She tells me that her leap to becoming a politician came years later when she was married to Dr John McManus, who is now her ex-husband, and both got involved in local politics in their hometown of Bray.

“John and I were on the Bray Town Council. If you get involved and start saying ‘why can’t we do this better?’ sooner or later, somebody is going to say: ‘Why don’t you stand for election?’ That’s what happened. I realised I could make a difference.”

She and John had four children and lived happily in their historic home on the seafront.

“James Joyce was a child when he lived in this house and then he went to Clongowes. The Christmas dinner scene from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where they have the argument about Parnell, is set in the dining hall. Academics and a trickle of people come to visit the house,” she says.

​Life is full of changes but there was one change which took Liz by surprise.

“My husband left me when I was 59. At the time I was devastated. I knew that there were problems in the marriage and I was as much to blame for the breakdown as he was, but I thought that we would just muddle on. But in the end, it was a liberation for him and a liberation for me.”

Why a liberation?

“For the first time in my life, I had to be a grown-up. Up until then it was very safe. You were in a household and there was a man. If everything crashed down, he’d still be out earning his crust of bread and be there for the children.

“He had the courage to walk away from the marriage and I admire him for that. The children were grown at this stage.”

​She didn’t deal with the break-up well though, and seeing how miserable she was, a friend urged her to go to counselling. She was reluctant but finally relented.

“I was weeping into the counsellor’s box of tissues and he said: ‘What are you most afraid of?’ I said: ‘I’m afraid of the future. I’m 59 years of age, what am I going to do?’

“He told me: ‘Instead of saying you are afraid of the future, why don’t you experiment with the future?’ It completely altered my way of looking at things.

“Two months after my marriage broke up, I met Seán when I was hillwalking with a group. He was divorced four years and we’ve been together ever since.

“He lives in his house and I live in mine and we’re lucky that we can do that. Neither of us wants to get married again. Been there, done that.

“We have lots of laughs. We did lots of travelling before Covid and we’re off to Estonia in the summer for a wedding.”

So, does she believe in second chances?

“Yes, but you have to be open to it. Some people, particularly widows, close in on themselves.

“My heart goes out to them when they lose their life partner but the important thing is to stay open to life.”

Currently, Liz leads a rich and interesting life. Her son Luke’s documentary film North Circular, released late last year, performed well in cinemas. And now her famous Bray home, in which she still lives, has Ukrainian residents.

“My Ukrainian family came to me via Facebook last April and they are with me ever since,” she says. “Elena is the mother and two children Yaraslav (17) and Evalina (7). Her husband Slava is fighting on the Eastern front and they can keep in contact with him by phone.

“They’re wonderful people – resilient, warm and despite everything, cheerful. Although language is an issue sometimes, we understand each other. The children are settled in schools and they all love Ireland and living beside the sea. They have a large cat called Leopold Bloom.”

And they supported her by making Ukrainian cakes for her book launch in the Unitarian Church.

​‘When Things Come to Light’ by Liz McManus is published by Arlen House

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