CLAIMS in her first book that a government minister had confessed to her that he took cocaine led to controversy over whether it was really a work of fiction, writes Colin Coyle.
Now Justine Delaney Wilson, the author of The High Society, is becoming a novelist.
The author, whose 2007 cocaine exposé was turned into a documentary by RTE, has been given a two-book deal by Hachette Ireland to write fiction.
Her first novel, An Ordinary Face, will be published on May 5, 2016, and is described as “contemporary book club fiction”. She is currently writing her second novel, Listening for the Weather, which is due to be published in 2017.
Delaney Wilson has been freelancing as a journalist in recent months and has also worked in television production. Following controversy over the veracity of some of the interviews in The High Society, in which a nun and a pilot also allegedly confessed to taking cocaine, RTE conducted an internal inquiry into a two-part documentary based on the book but the findings of its report were never published.
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The controversy over Delaney Wilson’s cocaine claims were exacerbated when she revealed that she had destroyed all recordings of her interviews with cocaine users, including the government minister who allegedly revealed to her in Buswell’s hotel that he had taken the drug. She claimed to have destroyed her tapes to secure the anonymity of her sources.
At the time both government and opposition politicians questioned the credibility of her claims.