CECELIA Ahern really has the Midas touch. The 26-year-old daughter of Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, a best-selling novelist with a batch of international hits to her name, can now add American TV hotshot to her list of accomplishments. Cecelia is the creator of the new ABC comedy series Samantha Who? which has scored some pretty impressive ratings since its debut a couple of weeks ago. Granted, it's airing on Monday nights after the massive juggernaut Dancing With the Stars, but the comedy, starring sitcom vet Christina Applegate, is holding on to the lion's share of the Dancing audience.

The most recent ratings were encouraging. Samantha attracted 13.7 million viewers, holding 82% of the ready-made Dancing audience. So impressed is ABC with the showing that they've ordered up a further six episodes of the series, the highest-rated comedy debut of the current season.

Once Dancing wraps at the end of November Samantha will air at 9 p.m., so it'll be interesting to see how it fares on its own merits. The storyline centers on Applegate's character, who awakens from a coma eight days after a car crash but remembers nothing about her previous life - which is kind of a blessing for her, since she was a . . . well, it rhymes with witch, if you know what we mean! How she tries to redeem herself is what makes the story go round, with some pretty funny occurrences.

The critics have given the show a so-so welcome. The New York Times liked Applegate in particular, but Variety gave it a big thumbs-down, as did the Boston Globe. No matter, as long as the ratings hold.

"Original ideas come to her all the time," Cecelia's agent Marianne Gunn O'Connor told the Irish Independent. "That and hard work are her secrets. She's an incredibly gifted storyteller and at the end of the day that's what has got her this success in American television."

The year will wrap on a further buzz for Cecelia with the December 21 release of the film PS, I Love You, starring Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler. The movie, based on Cecelia's first best-selling novel, was filmed partly in Ireland last year.

What did we say before about Cecelia being the daughter of the Irish PM? It's more like Bertie's the dad of one of the world's most entrepreneurial chick-lit queens!