How Brendan O'Carroll helped me through losing Grace

Mike Nolan has raised millions in memory of his daughter Grace — with the help of best pal Brendan O’Carroll, who also gave him a role in Mrs Brown’s Boys, writes Áilín Quinlan

FLORIDA, early 2002: a businessman and his best friend are sitting on a hotel balcony having a cup of tea. The businessman is 54-year-old Mike Nolan, a Cork father-of-seven grieving his nine-year-old daughter, lost to a rare genetic disorder two years previously. The best friend is comedian Brendan O’Carroll, the creator of the phenomenally successful TV series Mrs Brown’s Boys. The duo met in 1998 while playing a fundraising charity match in Cobh for footballer Paddy Shortt, a good friend of Nolan’s who had been diagnosed with cancer.

After the match, O’Carroll had offered the takings from the first night of his play Mrs Brown’s Boys, which was opening in the Everyman in Cork.

“We became good friends. I couldn’t forget his kindness and compassion towards Paddy Shortt’s fundraiser,” says Mike, who a few years later was able to repay his friend by providing financial support for a project of O’Carroll’s.

Mike has since appeared in series three of Mrs Brown’s Boys, both as an extra and as the landlord, Mr Foley — he’s due to appear in the 2013 Christmas special.

“I’m little more than a glorified extra, but it’s lovely to be part of it and I really enjoy it — at first you get very nervous but it becomes second nature after a while.”

But in Florida 2002 that was all still a long way in the future and Mike was, he says, still going through a “tough time” following the death of his daughter Grace, to the disorder HHT which affects blood vessel formation. As the men relaxed together in the Florida sun, Mike told O’Carroll about his plan to set up a foundation and a screening and treatment centre for HHT in her memory.

“I said that I’d need to raise money to fund it and also to create awareness of the condition.

“Brendan said that he thought it would be beautiful to get children aged between nine and 11 to write to Grace in heaven.

“They’d be writing about the year they’d had and talk about what was happening in the world or in Ireland. It’d be a letter to Grace. I thought it was a great idea.”

Recalling that day, O’Carroll says:

“At the time it was impossible for me to describe the pain I felt for both Mike and June at Grace’s tragic passing. Mike’s a kind and generous man and was finding it hard to cope, as was the rest of his family. Mike wanted to establish a screening and treatment centre, and when I put the idea of the Dear Grace book to Mike, he thought it was a great idea.

“I wanted to give him something positive to focus on that would help mend the wounds. I was delighted to help.”

On his return to Ireland, Mike set up the Grace Nolan Foundation — which has since raised and contributed millions of euro to research into HHT.

Next he organised a national letter-writing competition in memory of his daughter. And so it began — the ‘Dear Grace letters’ as they are known, have since become a hallmark of classroom life for fifth and sixth-class pupils in primary schools from Donegal to Cork.

Winners are announced at the annual Grace Awards in the Helix Centre in Dublin, a ceremony organised and run by O’Carroll. The winning letters have been compiled into a series of 10 books, Dear Grace, available in Easons and at gracenolan.com.

Grace became ill on a family holiday in Portugal in Easter 1999. She started to get nosebleeds and cough up blood — but tests had been inconclusive and doctors were unable to identify what was wrong.

Recalling how his maternal grandmother also had nosebleeds, Mike spoke to a relative, who said she was believed to have suffered from a condition called telangiectasia. Mike googled the word and discovered the existence of Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) a genetic disorder which affects the formation of blood vessels in one in an estimated 5,000 people.

Next he tracked down the HHT Foundation in America, which recommended Grace be screened at a special centre in London. An appointment was arranged for December but Grace never made it to London — she died on November 23. Her death came like a car crash, Mike recalls:

“When people are sick and you know they’re sick, you prepare yourself — but in this instance we weren’t prepared. We were devastated.”

The other six Nolan children were assessed and four were found to be very likely to have the condition.

In 2003, with the help of American expert, Dr Bob White of Yale Hospital, Mike set up a special centre for the screening and treatment of HHT in Cork’s Mercy Hospital, the only centre of its kind in Ireland. Mike and his children were screened at the unit. “I had my children screened again and it was confirmed that four of them had HHT along with me.”

Since then Mike’s extended family has also been tested — and several relatives, including his sister, two brothers and an uncle have all tested positive for HHT.

“As a result of the testing they’ve been treated. Grace would have been saved if she could’ve been assessed and treated earlier. But she didn’t die in vain because now the members of her family and over 300 other Irish families have been assessed and treated.

“There’s no doubt that lives have been saved as a result,” says Mike, currently a director of the American HHT Foundation.

He still hasn’t stopped — over the past six years he’s been working on bringing a prestigious conference on HHT to Ireland.

The conference, which will be hosted by The Grace Nolan Foundation, runs from today, June 12 to June 15 at the Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, UCC.

More than 250 doctors, scientists and other professionals in the area of HHT are in attendance to discuss current research and knowledge.

“This is only the second time the conference has been held outside of the United States; we’re very privileged to secure it for Cork and Ireland,” says Mike.

His friend O’Carroll says: “It’s another milestone achieved that will help find a cure and save lives — and all inspired by a little girl called Grace.”

* The social highlight of the Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) Conference at University College Cork this week will be a special “Cork HHT Gathering" in City hall on Friday June 14th to celebrate Cork’s rich tradition of food and drink.

* The conference ends with a gala musical extravaganza at the City Hall on June 15th. Tickets for this Cork HHT Gathering are available on request to [e-mail] for €100 with all proceeds going to the Grace Nolan Foundation.