Once upon a time, there was a prime minister called Bertie who, after a hard day's work running Ireland, liked nothing better than popping to his local pub in his old beloved anorak. He had two beautiful daughters. Georgina married a very rich pop star from Westlife called Nicky Byrne and sold the wedding shots to Hello!, posing with her dad, who was persuaded to leave the anorak at home.
While her sister went out to all the glittering parties, young Cecelia, sat up night after night writing a novel. She showed 10 chapters to a publisher in London who gave her £150,000.
Before long, US publishers paid another $1m (£0.55m) and the producer of Forrest Gump came to her with $100,000 for the film rights. But Irish people, envious of the vast sums, began to indulge in begrudgery.
While Bertie Ahern struggles against falling popularity and tries to solve the European constitution crisis and the Northern Ireland deadlock, his daughter, Cecelia Ahern, 22, is also preparing for a critical backlash as she launches her debut novel, PS I Love You, today with some of the biggest advance orders ever seen in Ireland.
It is the story of Holly who loses her lover, Gerry, to a terminal illness only to find he has left her a series of letters with monthly tasks to complete after his death. In the US, it has been compared to Bridget Jones's Diary and in the UK it will be serialised in a tabloid before its release in a week. But in Ireland, a nation where literature really matters, everyone has been asking if it's good enough.
Some Irish writers who have seen early copies took to the airwaves this week to lampoon the novel as "tosh... akin to a secondary school essay" while Ms Ahern's boyfriend, the athlete David Keoghan, phoned in to defend her.
With a vast literary heritage founded largely on the works of men - James Joyce, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde - Ireland is now one of the world's biggest exporters of chick-lit and takes huge pride in the tradition. Women's popular fiction is the biggest success story in Irish publishing, aided by the mother of the genre, Maeve Binchy, and a boom in bestselling writers like Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, Patricia Scanlan and Sheila O'Flanagan.
But part of the media frenzy surrounding the book centres on the bizarre media soap-opera that clings to Mr Ahern, a working-class Dubliner.
Mr Ahern left his his wife 15 years ago and began a long-term relationship with Celia Larkin. As a separated man enjoying a second relationship as the prime minister of a Catholic state which only recently approved divorce, he was unique.
But when he split from Ms Larkin recently, there was instant - most say far-fetched - speculation that he would go back to his estranged wife, Miriam, and their two daughters.
Ms Ahern's agent, Marianne Gunn O'Connor, insists that the first-time novelist, who has a journalism degree, is a gifted storyteller who impressed publishers even before they knew her surname. "She does not seek publicity, she is a very private person," she has said.
Yet the family name has guaranteed her acres of coverage, including a major piece in the Irish Times, a newspaper not known for its great interest in chick-lit.
Caroline Walsh, the literary editor of the Irish Times defended the paper's vast coverage of the novel, saying: "Ceclia Ahern is the newcomer in a much-watched genre, this is what interested me: what kind of Ireland would be projected by the new kid on the block."
