VIDEO: Take a look inside Mrs Brown’s Boys’ Eilish O’Carroll’s home in West Cork
You never know who you are going to meet on the backroads and boreens of West Cork.
As Irish Examiner photographer Denis Scannell was posing actor Eilish O’Carroll (she plays dim-but-decent Winnie McGoogan, the foil to mad-cap Agnes Brown/Brendan O’Carroll in the sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys, among other roles) outside her Toe Head home, they were greeted by a passer-by whose face framed through a car window was also familiar from the telly.
It was none other than UK and Irish actor Tony O’Callaghan, who has had roles in The Bill, Eastenders - and Fair City.
Actors? Ten a penny in West Cork, along with entertainers, writers, artists, and those myriad blow-ins who just love the beauty and tranquillity of the region.
Then, as Eilish was telling on an Irish Examiner video clip how she loves the people and the solitude of her scenic-set peninsula home along the Wild Atlantic Way, the minute’s filming was shaken first by a passing car, then by a truck, then by a juggernaut.
She dissolved laughing, saying “this just never happens.”
Upstaged. Again. And, in true Mrs Brown’s Boys fashion, there’s no ‘take-two’: the bloopers stay in her ‘home video’.
Being upstaged is a role Eilish is familiar with, cast as the simple, naive and trusting woman next door to the show’s fast-quipping wiseacre Brendan O’Carroll ( Eilish’s own brother,) in a show in which O’Carroll family nepotism reigns supreme.
She’s been involved since the first stage shows, featuring the Brown family, started in 1999 (after the Angelica Huston movie The Mammy,) then going on to TV fame with the BBC and RTÉ, as well as to movie fortunes with D’Movie, plus over one million box set and DVD sales, several ratings-topping Christmas shows, and, still, the cast relish live theatre shows.
“I’m out of the country 13 weeks a year,” says Eilish as the show’s formats and future goes from strength to stratospheric (the BBC wants Christmas specials up to 2020); and she also produces and acts in her own autobiographical one-woman show Live, Love, Laugh - almost a prequel to her house sale, and which could be billed Location, Location, Location.
“This house save my life,” recalls Eilish of the tougher times, back in the late 1990s when a rising house market saw her priced out of and repeatedly gazumped from every house she tried to buy after returning from the UK to her native Dublin.
Moving out from Dublin, she was outbid again in Kildare: “ I could have paid a mortgage with what I was paying in survey fees,” she says with some despondency.
"Eventually, she went to stay with a sister in Bantry who’d returned from the US (there’re ten siblings in the O’Carroll brood), and “almost in desperation I started to look down Skibbereen way, and I saw this beautiful spot. I said I’d buy it, but only if they accepted my offer in 24 hours - and, it stuck.”
What she bought almost on a desperate whim over 15 years ago was an old, quaint roadside home needing lots of work, with a 1970s extension, but hadn’t been lived in for a few years since its previous owner, Madge Burns, had died.
Now, Madge’s house has morphed into Eilish’s Cottage, ‘though its initial renovations were hit by slack times on the acting front just before Mrs Brown (and, in a way, the Examiner) came to the rescue.
“I had no work, no money, and a mortgage to pay. I put a small ad in the Irish Examiner to rent it for summer weeks, and it worked. I had to live in my car for a while it was rented, and later some friends I’d met helped out with a room and things changed around, I was able to pay my mortgage.”
The cottage, made-over now into a very comfortable full-time home as an acting career took flight, is for sale now as Eilish has another base in Cork city, where she lives with her partner Marion, who works on the stage production of Mr Brown’s boys.
Married twice before coming belatedly to the realisation she was gay, Eilish has two grown sons, and now has grandchildren who love coming to West Cork “to visit “the granny that lives by the beach.”
She relishes her years down west, all about the Castletownshend and Toe Head hinterland close to Skibbereen, as well as walks and cycles.
There’s also the friendships forged and good neighbours in abundance, a grounded lifestyle of quality, though she says talking to West Cork people “they know everything about you before they ask, and you go away after a conversation and realise you’ve been debriefed, interrogated!”
Postcard-pretty Eilish’s Cottage (complete with red shutters like theatre flats or curtains on the windows) goes to market this August with Sean Carmody of Charles P McCarthy Auctioneers in Skibbereen, who guides at €235,000 for a beguiling 800 sq ft, up-to-spec home on a scenic coastal road, very popular with cyclists.
“The first time I met Eilish, I was cycling out here, and got a puncture and I knocked on her door. We got tallking and she told me she was an actress with Mrs Brown’s Boys.
I told her I’d seen Brendan O’Carroll the previous year in the US when I was working in a bar, but didn’t want to disturb him.
She told me I should have gone up to him as she was there that evening too,” says Sean Carmody of a chance encounter that saw a puncture fixed, and now the prospect of some price inflation for his vendor too.
He reckons Eilish’s Cottage is as equally ideal as a full-time residence as a holiday bolthole, near some great beaches and coves.
It has two bedrooms, a quality bathroom, smart kitchen with granite tops, living/music room with theatre awards, and a hearth of gold. On a half acre with outdoor barbecue/stone fireplace, it has been filled with songs and merriment, and lavished with laughter.
“It wasn’t a holiday house for me, it was my home, but getting back here often enough was becoming stressful. I’m looking to sell - but I’m not giving up on West Cork,” says Eilish, leaving her name up in (low) lights over her finished production, Eilish’s Cottage.
: Shot on location.
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