The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll Read Online Free Page A

was three and a half months old, however, the overcrowding problem might have been eased by illness. Brendan developed serious pneumonia. Maureen was bereft. She sobbed to the family that there was a real chance the baby might not come home from hospital. The doctors feared the worst and Maureen asked the kids to pray to God he would be saved. (Three-year-old Eilish prayed he wouldn’t; she’d be the baby again and get all the attention that came with the job. Then she realised she’d committed the biggest sin she’d ever make – and wanted to go straight to the confessional.) But Brendan, clearly with a toughness the family were yet to realise, made it back home to Ballymun.
    Those safe four walls were soon to disappear, however. In 1957, Maureen lost her seat in the Dáil. She’d been involved in a campaign to prevent canned food company Batchelors from operating a national monopoly, and it’s claimed big business interests conspired to have her ousted.
    Maureen would never stop lobbying for the working classes of Dublin, particularly women’s groups, but the loss of the job and decent salary meant the O’Carrolls could no longer afford to live in the ‘big’ house. All they could do was to throw themselves on the mercy of the Corporation and accept the keys to a new home at 11 Casemont Grove, in Finglas.
    Finglas is a housing estate, ten miles from Brendan’s first home and built around a tiny medieval hamlet that dates back to Cromwell’s time in Ireland.
    It was reinvented in the 1950s to house the Dubliners decanted from crumbling homes in the city centre. The idea, as was the case with many such schemes in the UK, was sound in theory. The small red-brick semis had gardens and were surrounded by green fields; perfect for playing football and producing stars of the future such as Liverpool’s Ronnie Whelan.
    Brendan invited me over to Ireland, to see the area where he grew up. What caught the eye in driving into Finglas, some 50 yards from Brendan’s home in Casemont Grove, was a horse standing alone on a grass verge. What was it doing there?
    ‘Sure, we all had horses as kids,’ he tells me, grinning. ‘They almost roamed wild and we’d all ride them and leave them to feed in the fields.’
    But that was the problem with Finglas. There was little around but green fields.
    ‘There was nothing,’ says Brendan, his despondent voice reflecting the hard times. ‘You could play football in those fields, and that was about it.’
    The town planners, in their haste to build a brave new world, had ignored the fact that people needed more, such as shops, schools, swimming pools and community centres. There was at least an old cinema, The Casino, built in the 1940s in the old village, which hosted John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies, and Brendan would see films there until it closed in the early 1970s.
    ‘Mammy and I spent any night out we had at the pictures. If we really liked a film we would go see it again, but if it were an afternoon showing we’d sit through it two or three times, as you could in those days. We saw Mary Poppins twenty-eight times, which is still one of my favourites, Kelly’s Heroes twenty times, The Wrong Box fifteen times, and when I became a teenager I watched The Producers fifteen times.
    ‘I loved the fact you could go to the pictures and imagine you were the boy up there on the screen. I never thought that one day I’d ever be in a movie, that would have been crazy, but the films allowed you the chance to dream, to use your imagination. And I suppose what I also got from the movies was the sense of storytelling. I loved a good story. And Mary Poppins was a great story.
    ‘What I also realised at the time was I loved a story with a happy ending.’ Fundamentally, Finglas had next-to-nothing. But what it did have in abundance was kids. It was 99 per cent Catholic and most families had at least eight children. If a family unit had three or four kids they were regarded as a