The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (3 page)

Maureen O’Carroll took the cucumber approach when dealing with the Irish establishment and fighting for women’s rights.

‘My mother was a force of nature,’ Brendan recalls. ‘She said, “I’m not having that!” and joined the union and battled to get that law changed. She shares that feisty, fighting spirit with Agnes Brown.

‘But there was more to anger my mother,’ he remembers. ‘Ireland at this time was in the Middle Ages. For example, it was legal in the Fifties to beat your wife with a stick, provided the stick wasn’t longer than your forearm.’

Maureen O’Carroll would fight to have that law changed. She became a local activist and helped set up the Lower Prices Council, which campaigned against high prices and black marketeering in the aftermath of the Second World War. It’s an angry, argumentative approach to life that Mrs Brown also manifests.

It wasn’t such a huge surprise when the Irish Labour Party asked her to run for parliament, the Dáil Éireann. But it was a surprise when she won in the General Election of 1954 for Dublin North Central. There had been other female Teachta Dála’s (TDs, the Irish equivalent of an MP) elected to Parliament, but only as part of the tradition of widows automatically taking their husbands’ places.

Maureen O’Carroll won on her own ticket, becoming not only the first female Chief Whip in any political parliament, but also Labour’s Shadow Minster for Foreign Affairs.

It was remarkable for a working-class female to achieve that level of success. But what made her achievement even more extraordinary was that she had given birth to nine children.

‘The woman had a womb like a machine gun,’ says Brendan.

And, in what offers an insight into the character of Maureen O’Carroll, one of her kids, Phil, was adopted.

Why would a lady who’d had Leonard (who died as an infant), Maureen, Martha, Pat, Gerard, Finbar, Fiona, Michael and Eilish even contemplate taking in someone else’s child?

‘My mother’s brother’s wife’s sister had a baby, Phil, who was brought up by the grandmother,’ Brendan recalls. ‘And the mother was always going to rear her son, when she got work and married.

‘But the grandmother died when Phil was seven. And his mother’s boyfriend didn’t want to take him on. Phil went into reform school, because there were no care homes in Ireland at the time. And he would have stayed there for the rest of his young life.’

When Phil came to visit the O’Carrolls, he became besotted with Maureen. And she adored him. He was one of the lucky ones, taken to the Dáil for a visit. And when Phil returned to the reform school, he started writing to her. Maureen would then invite Phil to spend the summer holidays and Christmas with her family. One summer he fell off the garden wall and broke his arm. It was a blessing in disguise. That night, Maureen gathered the family around.

‘Why don’t we keep him?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Maureen,’ said her husband. ‘Sure, we’ve enough mouths to feed.’

‘So we wouldn’t even notice another one.’

That night, Martha O’Carroll went up to the boys’ room and said to Phil, ‘How would you like to live with us forever?’

Phil threw his arms around her, in silence, scarcely believing it could be possible. But officialdom reared its frightening head. The reform school headmaster told Maureen O’Carroll she couldn’t go around adopting stray kids. There were rules.

Maureen O’Carroll was indignant. She kicked up such a fuss you could see the dust clouds in Cork. Somehow, the story was leaked to the press (most likely by Maureen), and her willingness to right this particular wrong would certainly have inspired Che Guevara had he heard about it in Cuba. She tackled the Minister for Education and phoned the head of government, Éamon de Valera himself.

‘How’s the form with the Big Fella?’ she said to his secretary, in a tone that Mrs Brown would have been proud of.

And her boldness and reputation saw her put through to de Valera. Strings were pulled. And, shortly afterwards, Phil came to live with the family.

Somehow, the O’Carrolls got by in their little two-bedroomed house.

‘The girls were in one room, the boys in the other, and my father slept in the boys’ room,’ Brendan recalls. ‘He built bunk beds up the sides of the wall. It was like living in a feckin’ submarine.’

Eilish, the baby of the family, didn’t even have a bunk. For the first few years of her life she slept in a top drawer. But the kids were happy in this congested world. There was a safety in numbers, a security. And they didn’t know any better. Most of the families in their street were also huge, and everyone struggled. So what if you had to sleep in a drawer, or share a bed with a few sisters? What was important was a sense of being loved.

Yet, it would be wrong to suggest Maureen O’Carroll’s priority in life was scooping up underprivileged children, or indeed spending every waking hour looking after her own. There’s no doubt she loved kids. She would make soup and homemade bread. But she was no Ma Walton. Maureen had her work to focus on. The kids had her attention until a political crisis took her off on a mission. It was Gerry O’Carroll who’d bathe the kids, wash the clothes, feed hungry faces porridge before he left for work. Maureen O’Carroll was a woman ahead of her time, but when it came to battling causes, her time was her own.

And sometimes she would use it to indulge her duchess-like habit of taking to her bed when things got a little demanding. And it would often be Martha or Patricia who would tend to the needs of her siblings when Gerry O’Carroll was at work.

But when Maureen was at home, she made her presence felt. If the kids incurred her displeasure, they wouldn’t have to open the door to leave the room, they could slither out underneath it. Yet, she also had the talent of making people feel they were the most special in the world, a skill her youngest certainly inherited.

When Maureen felt happy, in control and fulfilled, everyone was happy.

Being a TD made Maureen O’Carroll very happy. And there was enough money for the family to buy a house in Ballymun, with three bedrooms (Maureen had a room to herself while Gerry shared a room with the boys), but with a separate kitchen and a large dining room.

However, in February 1955, Maureen O’Carroll had real reason to take to her bed. The 41-year-old mother-of-nine felt sick. She had serious stomach problems. And she worried there was something badly wrong. Or perhaps she was going through the change?

Her doctor examined her. That night she went home and wrote in her diary: ‘Went to see Dr Carney today. I’m either pregnant or I have a growth. (Please, God it’s a growth.)’

Seven months later, on 15 September, the growth arrived weighing nine pounds three ounces.

She called it Brendan.

The Growth

FORTUNATELY, the growth wasn’t malignant, although it did make a bit of a noise at first and demand regular attention. Yet the O’Carrolls took to this blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy immediately. Seven-year-old Fiona was certainly in raptures from the moment she first clapped eyes on him.

And there was a sense in which Brendan was indeed special. After all, the other kids had been born at home but Maureen O’Carroll deemed her final child would be born in a private nursing home.

Three-year-old Eilish, however, no longer the baby of the family, didn’t think her baby brother to be
that
special. She wasn’t quite so happy at the spotlight being shunted away. (A few years later during her weekly confession, after she’d admitted to ‘a few fecks’, she’d confess to beating her little brother about the head on a regular basis.)

And it’s fair to say Brendan was an attention grabber. Incredibly quick to learn, he almost bypassed the walking stage by running, a little boy who already seemed to have pressed the fast-forward button on life. (And his state of perpetual motion hasn’t stopped since.)

Brendan was talking by the age of two and even a great imitator. He’d be in his high chair while the family were having dinner and the little Woody Woodpecker-like high voice (which would later become Agnes Brown’s) would yell out, ‘You’re all fecked now!’ And Maureen O’Carroll would yell, ‘Who taught him to say that?’

The clever little foul-mouth (start as you mean to go on) could manipulate his sisters. Lying in bed, he’d say to Fiona, ‘Draw a map on my back’. And when she stopped, he’d say, ‘No, you’ve only drawn Ireland! It’s too small. Draw Russia!’

Patricia was the sister most often left in charge of the baby brother while Mammy was off saving the world. And he was a handful. When doing the housework, she wanted the fast-moving infant out of the way, so she’d lift him up by his little dungarees and hang him up on a hook on the door. He’d just smile and say ‘Oh, oh!’

‘I loved it up on that hook,’ he recalls, grinning.

Brendan had arrived into an already noisy world with nine siblings, and the older O’Carroll kids reaching their hormone-fuelled teens (Maureen, the oldest, was 18).

And it was a constant competition for everything, from space to food to attention. Whoever could shout the loudest was heard. Whoever could eat fastest got seconds. Whoever could sing best was applauded. And the talent competition’s sole judge and jury? Maureen O’Carroll.

When Brendan 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 rarity; people often presumed the parents didn’t get on.

Most of the kids who roamed happily in their hordes around Finglas wore regulation plastic shoes, and when the plastic wore out, the shoes were filled with linoleum inserts. Most young people, especially girls, stayed only until they were old enough to move abroad to find employment.