He was young, bright, self-confident, good-looking and a good communicator. All set up to be a great success… or maybe a spectacular failure. And so it played out.

Murphy failed to turn around the housing crisis and a series of human tragedies engulfed him in his time as housing minister. An incident at the start of the election campaign, the removal of a tent by a digger causing life-changing injuries to the man inside, seemed to personify the failure of the State.

By 2020, after about two-and-a-half years in the job, Murphy had become a hate figure – not just for his opponents, but his colleagues, and even some he thought of as his friends.

He told The Indo Daily: “I’d go to a bar with a girl I’d be on a date with and they’d be straight over to like give me shit and give her horrible shit, like horrible stuff. One of the most difficult ones was a man who came up to me with his young daughter and said, ‘honey, this is the man who’s making all those kids homeless’.”

Today, on The Indo Daily, Fionnán Sheahan is joined by former Fine Gael TD and former housing minister Eoghan Murphy, now author of Running from Office: Confessions of Ambition and Failure in Politics.