Frankly, I don\u2019t know what women see in me. But I have got through more of them than King Henry VIII.<\/p>\n
My first wife was \u201cthe actress Si\u00e2n Phillips\u201d. She and I had two daughters together \u2013 Kate and Patricia. I can\u2019t remember whether it was during or after this marriage that I \u201calso had a son, Lorcan Patrick O\u2019Toole\u201d with my \u201cgirlfriend Karen Brown\u201d. <\/p>\n
I was subsequently married to Eileen Flynn. And then (forgive me if the chronology is a bit off \u2013 it gets hard to keep track) to the excellent British writer and critic Maya Jaggi, with whom I also had two daughters. I then moved on to the late great travel writer Dervla Murphy. We had \u201cone daughter together named Aoife\u201d. And since I apparently liked my fourth wife\u2019s first name, but got tired of the relationship, I dumped her and moved on to Dervla Chambers. <\/p>\n
I am now married to \u201cthe author Aoife Moore\u201d. But who knows for how long? As the Liz Taylor of Irish journalism I may look for the love of my life at least once more before they send me to the nursing home. I may even go back to Si\u00e2n who still looks fabulous at 93. If you\u2019re reading this darling, do give me a call for old time\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n
I must confess I\u2019ve been a terrible father to Kate, Patricia, Lorcan, Aoife and those other two daughters with Maya whose names, to my eternal shame, I can\u2019t now recall. <\/p>\n
But then, they\u2019re been pretty neglectful too. On Father\u2019s Day the other week not one of the brats sent me a card with a knowing double entendre or a pair of novelty socks. I am cutting them all out of my will, although admittedly after I\u2019ve split my assets between all the ex-wives and girlfriends there won\u2019t be much left.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s<\/a> AI Overviews also suggest that \u201cFintan O\u2019Toole has one known sibling, a brother named Ryan and a sister named Jade\u201d. Apart from the delightful doubling of my one known sibling (or did Ryan transition to Jade?), I do kind of understand why I never knew about either of them. Brendan Behan<\/a> claimed that in Crumlin, Dublin, where I grew up, they \u201cate their young\u201d. I can tell you that in the 1950s and 1960s any kids called Ryan or Jade would have been first on the menu.<\/p>\n The estimable journalist and podcaster Aoife Moore will be relieved to hear that all of the above (with the exception of my marriage to Dervla Murphy, which was on Wikipedia until last year) is from recent or current summaries provided by AI Overviews and OpenAI\u2019s<\/a> ChatGPT<\/a> of \u201cFintan O\u2019Toole, the well-known Irish journalist and literary critic\u201d. <\/p>\n None of these, sadly, is true. Unless I am further advanced into amnesia than I can remember, I have only ever had one wife (the current one). I have two sons, but have been inexcusably negligent when it comes to the production of daughters.<\/p>\n Some of this gunk has crudely logical origins. Obviously, Si\u00e2n Phillips was married to Peter O\u2019Toole<\/a> and they did have daughters Kate and Pat, both distinguished actors \u2013 as is Lorcan O\u2019Toole whose mother is indeed Karen Brown. AI actually knows that all of these stellar people have nothing whatsoever to do with me \u2013 it warns that \u201cPeter O\u2019Toole the actor is not directly related to Fintan, despite the shared surname\u201d \u2013 but it lumps us in together anyway, using the more famous of us (me) to \u201crecognise\u201d the more obscure Peter.<\/p>\n I can also see how the machine came up with me being married to Eileen Flynn. It trawled a column I wrote here last year<\/a> about how my wife and I had to keep secret our marriage in a register office in 1983 because she was teaching in a Catholic school: \u201cLess than six months before our wedding, another teacher in a convent school, Eileen Flynn, was fired from her job because she was living with, and had become pregnant by, a man to whom she was not married\u201d. The proximity of \u201cour wedding\u201d with the name \u201cEileen Flynn\u201d caused the algorithm to put one and one together and get #%&!!*???<\/p>\n