Cork balloon artist's bid to inflate happiness levels

Jenny Murphy, Clonakilty, Co Cork of Red Balloon Cork put these balloons up in her front garden as part of a worldwide project One Million Bubbles of Joy to help bring smiles to people’s faces. Picture Dan Linehan

A balloon artist was up at the crack of dawn over the bank holiday weekend adorning her colourful house in a bid to spread some positivity.

For Jenny Murphy, it’s all designed to help make people smile.

The bright display outside her house in Clonakilty is part of the worldwide initiative called One Million Bubbles, launched to help cheer people up during the current situation.

“It’s about creating a positive atmosphere in your locality, whether you might be in an apartment, or an estate,” says Jenny.

More than 1,860 people have taken part so far.

“People have been going with ‘stay safe’ or ‘be kind’, I thought the most important thing we can do is wash our hands, so I went with that instead.

“It was set to be lovely and bright and sunny on Monday so I went out at six o’clock in the morning and started to attach the balloons to the outside my house.”

The balloons are fastened to a string of fairy lights, which will be turned on when it gets dark.

“I did it in the dark of night, throwing fairy lights out the window and I thought to myself ‘no one really knows what I’m at’ so I must have looked very funny,” says Jenny.

“Everyone here is kind already. We live in West Cork, everyone is always kind, we’ve fantastic neighbours and there’s a lovely positive vibe around the place.

“We need to keep our social distance of course but we also need to make sure we keep making people smile. There are so many people who are in social isolation in a house by themselves. People are so nervous and a smile can make a big difference. Especially if people are on their own right now, day and night.”

Like many businesses across the country, Ms Murphy’s business, Red Balloon, based in Ballincollig, has felt the effects of the Covid-19 shutdown due to the cancellation of many events and social distancing restrictions.

“We’re working on a plan to do a courier delivery service because we can’t deliver balloons ourselves, we’re a non-essential service, but we can send them out,” says Jenny. “We’re looking at sending out balloons in boxes so people can still receive them, because even though we are in this time, people are still having birthdays and celebrations.”

It’s important to keep celebrating events like birthdays and anniversaries, she believes.

“There’s two days between my neighbours’ birthdays, they turned 13 and 15 respectively. It was lovely being able to send them balloons. Two weeks ago, I couldn’t give my mum balloons because she lives in another part of the county and I couldn’t travel out to her. So I thought, ok we need to do something.”

Red Balloon is working on setting up the service via its website, she adds.

“Hopefully we will have it up very quickly.”