FROM that day we first met, ten years ago, Brendan and I established a pattern in our relationship. When Brendan arrived in Glasgow we’d meet up in his favourite café and talk right through the afternoon hours.
The chats would seldom pass uninterrupted, however. Aside from the waiters and waitresses coming over to say hello (he knew not only their first names, but little details of their lives), the members of the Mrs Brown circus would pop in: wife Jenny, son Danny or friend Bugsy. They’d all say hi and offer a quick hug. I was drawn into this close world. (I could see Brendan didn’t need to seek out the new. Everything and everybody he needed travelled with him.)
We were close, and it was all very relaxed when we got down to the matter of his life story.
‘I suppose I’d better start with my grandmother’s story,’ he says, taking a sip of cappuccino, as if to fuel the tale that was about to unfold.
‘Flashback to 17 September 1911, in Dublin City, Ireland. And seventeen-year-old Lizzie was set to marry Michael McHugh. The pair were madly in love and ready to head to America together to start a new life – but without telling Lizzie’s parents.
‘Why did they need to elope? Well, Ireland was a desperate place at the time; life was tough and young people were emigrating across the globe. But for them there was more than that. Lizzie’s father, you see, was deeply against them marrying. Michael was a Republican associated with Michael Collins’ “Brotherhood”, which Lizzie’s father detested, and Michael, in his mid-thirties, was almost the same age as Lizzie’s father himself.
‘So, when Lizzie’s father heard of the romance, he pummelled Michael with the poker, breaking his forearm and collarbone. Michael and Lizzie knew there and then that they had to escape Ireland. That’s why they had saved for a year to buy the tickets for the long sea voyage.
‘But Lizzie’s mother found out about the plan and convinced her husband he had to accept Michael, or he’d lose his daughter for ever.
‘And he did. Michael and Lizzie’s father shook hands and everyone hugged and, the next day, Michael McHugh put an advertisement in the Classified Section of the newspaper offering his boat tickets for sale.
‘He sold the tickets for the journey to America to a young policeman and his newly married wife. There were four tickets. Two of them would take the couple by train down to Queenstown in Cork, and the other two were for their sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to America.
‘And the ship they would sail on? The SS Titanic. The policeman survived, but not his new wife.
‘Meanwhile, Lizzie and Michael became Mr and Mrs McHugh and, ten months later, a child was born, just skipping scandal by a week. A baby girl. She was christened Maureen. And she was my mammy.’
And she was the woman who provided most of the inspiration for Brendan’s sitcom heroine, Agnes Brown.
‘Agnes Brown is Che Guevara in a dress,’ he says, grinning.
Guevara was of course a bearded, cigar-puffing, sweat-stained Argentinian who died in a Bolivian ambush. But he fought unfairness in his world, to protect the unprotected. And so too did Maureen O’Carroll.
‘People used to ask me if Agnes Brown was based on my mother, and I’d say no. But in recent times, I’ve come to realise just how close they are.’
Indeed. Indeed. Both are battlers. Both could find a colourful adjective when roused, although Maureen was smarter, and way more ambitious than the havoc-creating, uneducated fruit-market worker. Maureen O’Carroll could definitely deliver a cutting one-liner, just as Agnes Brown does. Maureen could also take a simple tea towel and turn it into a weapon, as Agnes frequently does. Both Maureen and Agnes would lay down their lives for their kids, but loved to make fun of them.
Brendan’s mammy also had that ability to get what she wanted out of people, just as Agnes can, using the cleverest of psychology, becoming a little bit pathetic when required. And if that didn’t work, like Agnes, she would tell the world exactly where it was going wrong.
Maureen’s healthy disrespect for authority – life is to be challenged; rules are there to be broken – is evident in Agnes. As Agnes does, Maureen lived in crowded houses, and managed to create her own safe little world.
There are more similarities. Maureen wasn’t entirely comfortable with modern devices either. She had little time for small-minded people.
And Agnes Brown now, and Maureen O’Carroll then, would be ready and willing to smack the face of injustice with the back of their hands.
Maureen McHugh, as she was before marriage, certainly didn’t have to search far to find inequity in early 20th-century Ireland.
Born on 29 March 1913, her father Michael was an academic, a schoolteacher from Galway who was also a freedom fighter; not in the sense of taking to the streets of Dublin with a gun to fight the Black and Tans during the 1916 uprising, but working behind the scenes. And he was arrested and spent time in a British prison.
But Michael McHugh, who only ever spoke Gaelic, believed Irish Catholic equality could only come about through education. And he instilled in his four children – including his eldest, his daughter Maureen, to whom he was especially close – that they could be anything they wanted to be in life. Just so long as they learned.
When Michael McHugh died however, aged 48 (he’d contracted TB from his time in prison), his slim, dark-haired 12-year-old daughter’s future looked bleak. At the time, secondary education in Ireland had to be paid for, and Maureen could, at best, expect to become a seamstress or a waitress. But money was filtered down to the family from an organisation called The White Cross, a fund raised by the IRA to educate children of the men who’d given their lives to the cause.
As a result, young Maureen was sent to County Mayo, 250 kilometres away on the other side of the country (traditionally, Irish girls were sent away, to England, or abroad, in the hope of a better life), to a boarding school, to be taught by the nuns who would become her surrogate family.
Maureen was, at first, broken-hearted to be parted from her mammy Lizzie and her siblings, but the young girl was very clever, very religious, and realised the way ahead was to please the nuns. And so why not become one?
Maureen had incredible energy and studied hard, and her reward was to be sent on to University College Galway, a rare achievement for women at the time, as a novice nun.
It’s not clear what made Maureen McHugh rethink her life plan and decide to renounce her vows. Perhaps university opened a window on another world? Perhaps the huge personality and determination she would later reveal meant her life was not best suited to subservience and being married to Jesus. Or perhaps she realised she’d one day prefer to be married to an actual, living man.
Whatever, Maureen, like her father, believed Ireland’s future was dependent upon educating people out of poverty. And so she became a teacher of languages, and loved her career. But perhaps what she taught best were human values.
Once, she invited an artistically gifted pupil to camouflage a crack in the classroom window by painting a version of The Last Supper on it. The result was so impressive that she invited the child’s parents to the school to see their daughter’s work. However, paying no attention to the painting, they presumed that the youngster had broken the window. In later years, Mrs O’Carroll would remind Brendan to always look at the picture, not the crack.
Meantime, the earthly man she did fall in love with had appeared on the scene, Gerard O’Carroll. The O’Carrolls were said to descend from one of the kings of Ireland, who fought with the 11th-century Irish king, Brian Boru. Gerry, however, wasn’t a fighter. He was a soft-spoken, gentle cabinet-maker (the basis for Mr Wiseman, the cabinet-maker in Brendan’s early books), with an easy-going personality. But, like most Dubliners, he hadn’t managed to avoid the collateral damage of the freedom-fighting movement.
‘Aged nine, he was almost killed by Black and Tan gunmen who came to the house looking for his IRA-serving older brothers,’ says Brendan. ‘The Black and Tans didn’t find them, but they left my grandfather bleeding and my dad’s grandfather lying dead beside him.’
Gerry O’Carroll didn’t hold onto his anger. He didn’t preach politics to his kids, although he would argue party politics with his future wife, Maureen. Gerry supported Fianna Fáil (the party opposed to the treaty with England), while Maureen backed the Irish Labour movement.
Yet, the pair were soulmates. They were opposites in terms of personality (which had to be the case, given Maureen’s was so large), but there was a connection that made them inseparable.
The couple planned their life together in an area called Cowstown, which once formed Dublin’s city centre before the city swelled. Comprising several streets of tiny little red-brick terraced houses, it was so called because cattle were once herded through the streets on their way to market.
‘The walls of the little houses around Cowper Street and Stoneybatter still have the foot-scrapers near the front doors, used for cleaning off the cow dung,’ says Brendan, taking me on a tour of the neighbourhood.
‘This is the very same street in which I drive a hearse when I play the undertaker in Angela’s Ashes. Moore Street is not far away from here, where Agnes Brown has a market stall.
‘And the women who work there are Mrs Brown. As you go along the street, past the flower and fruit stalls, the women get madder and madder, but they’re absolute sweethearts. I love them. When I was at school, I would run down to Moore Street after the bell rang, stash my schoolbag and run errands for the old wans.
‘You know, they still give me a bunch of flowers and say, “That’s for your mammy.” Now, my mother has been dead for thirty years, but it still reveals their innate kindness.’
We strolled over to look closely at his two-bedroomed house, which once had an outside toilet.
‘It’s been done up now. In fact, this area is now gentrified, home to starter families and young professionals who work close by in the city.’
North Dublin was, and is, the poorer part of the city. The river Liffey separates north from south, rich from the poorer. The largest cathedral is on the south side, while the largest dole office is on the north. The Houses of Parliament are on the south, the Sanitary Department on the north. Even the Liffey segregates, dumping the litter and effluent on its northern bank.
The O’Carrolls lived on the north side. And so too did struggle and adversity. It’s ironic that fruit-market trader Agnes Browne (as her surname was spelt originally), of Brendan’s novels, works in Moore Street from daybreak; this was a place surrounded by food – yet food was often unaffordable.
But as well as facing the endemic poverty that Ireland suffered in the 1940s, newly-weds Maureen and Gerry faced an immediate crisis. On the day she was married in 1936, Maureen O’Carroll was fired from her job. It was illegal for female teachers in Ireland (indeed all female civil servants) to be married.
Did Maureen O’Carroll take this lying down? In a scene from Brendan’s first book, The Mammy, Agnes, hearing her daughter Cathy has had her hair cut forcibly by nuns, approaches the convent sister ‘and somehow finds herself skelping the head nun in the face with a cucumber.’
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.