Former taoiseach Charles Haughey offered to make novelist Frederick Forsyth a Senator if he agreed to stay in Ireland, the writer has said.

Forsyth, who lived in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, for a number of years, said his wife grew worried about their family’s safety during the Troubles and decided she wanted to move back to the United Kingdom.

Forsyth, who was friendly with Haughey at this point, went to the taoiseach and said, “look, I’m sorry, but we wish to leave and go back”.

The writer, who is best known for his spy novels, said Haughey tried to persuade him to stay in Ireland.

“He even offered me a senatorship,” Forsyth told the Sean O’Rourke show on RTÉ 1.

“He said, ‘I can’t offer you citizenship because your grandfather came from Youghal so you’re entitled to citizenship but I can offer you a senatorship will you stay?’”

Forsyth said he was friends with Haughey even though the Fianna Fáil politician was “never a friend of the United Kingdom...I don’t know how or why we got on but we did.”

He added: “He had a lady friend at the time who used to give intimate little dinner parties around the pine table in her basement kitchen to which my wife and I were invited and there were often only six or eight people there.

“That was when Charlie took his jacket off and relaxed a bit, had a few jars and became very affable and whatever. We got on pretty well, I think.”

The writer, who is promoting his memoir The Outsider - My Life in Intrigue, also said Haughey asked him for advice on how to keep Pope John Paul II safe during the 1979 Papal visit.

“He said to me, ‘you know all about assassinations…’ He wanted to present a paper to Cabinet about how to keep the Holy Father alive if there were ever a threat...

“I thought back to the days in Paris and the way the French counter intelligence protected de Gaulle, who really was under threat of assassination by the cream of the cream of the French army. So I thought, ‘if they can keep him alive in those circumstances surely the Holy Father, just going to give mass in Phoenix Park, shouldn’t be a problem.

“Nevertheless, I put to him a paper-anonymous, of course-which I believe he presented to Cabinet and covered himself in glory as the man who knew how to keep the Pope alive.”