Cork legend Billa O’Connell’s beloved Lough home goes on the market after 70 years

The Cork home of late entertainer Billa O’Connell, lived in for seven decades beside The Lough, is now for sale at €395k

Playing it for laughs: Lough stock Billa O'Connell  and Nell hammed it up at home at 6 The Lough to promote a  Cork city panto

The Lough, Cork City
€395,000
Size	100 sq m (1,080 sq ft)
Bedrooms	3
Bathrooms	1
BER	E2

THE family home of the late and legendary Cork entertainer, Billa O’Connell, is up for sale.

It’s located by The Lough, the lake and wildfowl nature reserve that gives the area its name. The house is just 50 metres from where he was born and raised — his love of being hyper-local saw the dame of Cork pantos dubbed ‘the cock of the Lough’.

6 Lough Park 

 Known to generations of theatre- and panto-goers simply as Billa, the comedic Cork icon was made a freeman of Cork City in 2013.

His heart was always at The Lough: Born in 1930 on Lough Rd, he moved into No 6 Lough Park in the mid-1950s when he married his beloved Nell, with the eight semi-detached houses in Lough Park built by his father Bill with his own brother Paddy.

Billa at the Lough

The long Lough links are recalled by Billa’s son, also Bill, following the 2021  passing of Billa as he and his five siblings are now, with heavy hearts, selling No 6 Lough Park after the death of Nell O’Connell (nee Cotter) in April of this year.

Most of the couple’s six children, and grandchildren, continue to live by the Lough, while Billa’s sister Breda took over the original family home in front of Lough Park, now a hair salon.

6 Lough Park rear

Generations of the O’Connell family (four, to date at least, named Bill!) are as native to the Lough as the coots, ducks, geese, and swans.

Billa and Nell O’Connell’s immaculate home for 70 years at No 6 Lough Park comes to the late summer market with agent Sean McCarthy of ERA Downey McCarthy, priced at €395,000 for a spotless three-bed semi-detached home with a west-facing rear.

Set piece

The hope and expectation is that it will be bought by a young family as in thrall to the place as the O’Connell family.

Apart from being an actor and entertainer with comedic timing and a razor-sharp riposte, the late Billa O’Connell also worked for 30 years with the Beamish & Crawford brewery as a sales representative with only a lip for repartee:

He was a total pioneer for most of his life and turned up for work with the brewery on day one with his Pioneer Total Abstinence Association pin… the joke perhaps not lost on his brewery bosses.

Billa enjoying a joke at home

Billa trod the boards in both the old, and ‘new’ Cork Opera House, and tells this story:

As a just-married man proudly in his ‘own’ home shortly after he married Nell, with only a box from Thompson’s bakery as a table, the couple noticed a light in the sky on the night of December 12, 1955, coming into the peak Christmas season for actors.

“Bill, look, it’s the aurora borealis,” Nell told Bill. “Nell, that’s not the aurora borealis: That’s the furniture we were going to be able to afford buy, going up in flames,” Billa responded.

6 Lough Park 

The Opera House fell into a decade of darkness before its replacement was opened in 1965.

The Opera House recovered; Billa had over another half a century of laughs and Lough lore left in him — and No 6 got comfortably furnished, full of happy family memories too.

Panto bliss: Paddy Comerford and Billa O'Connell as The Ugly Sisters in a Cork Opera House production of Cinderella

VERDICT: Beloved by the Lough, and clearly a location for life: The late Billa O’Connell wouldn’t be long coming up with a quip about the Lough, old stock, and barrels of laughs.