Mrs Linders gives Room to Improve its best outing yet

Let’s just put it on the record, here. I knew Mary Linders was a star long before Dermot Bannon discovered her and ended up beating a hard bag of flour with a rolling pin at her instruction, writes Terry Prone.

Mary Linders was the heart of a recent edition of Room to Improve, and if you didn’t catch it, use the bank holiday to go on RTÉ Player and find it. The date was March 11, and it’s probably the best outing the programme has had, thanks to Ma Linders. That’s not to disregard her daughters Marian and Anne, but the two of them know the score by now: The minute their mother enters the conversation, everybody else might as well hang up their conversational boots.

In the programme, my battered Martello tower appears a couple of times. In a small way, in the background to the shots of the house on the Quay. Mrs Linders is a physically distant next door neighbor, her house separated from mine by her son’s mobile home park.