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SITCOM star Brendan O’Carroll says his inspiration was the nun turned mum-of-11 who brought him up while also becoming a top politician.

 

Brendan O’Carroll says the inspiration for his hit character Mrs Brown was from is mum Maureen [BBC]

When Maureen O'Carroll decided she wanted to give a home to an illegitimate child who had ended up in reform school after his grandmother died her husband Gerry pointed out that she had already given birth to nine children of her own so they had enough mouths to feed. Maureen brushed away his doubts saying: "So we wouldn't even notice another one."

Gerry, a cabinet-maker, duly set to work building another of the bunk beds that made their twobedroom house in North Dublin look like the inside of a submarine. But the headmaster of the reform school said Maureen couldn't just adopt any children she wanted.

Not accustomed to taking "no" for an answer she launched a press campaign on the lad's behalf and called the prime minister's office demanding to speak to Éamon de Valera himself. She got through, strings were pulled and the adoption went ahead.

Fans of Mrs Brown's Boys, the chaotic Irish sitcom which this week hits the big screen, may not be too surprised that Maureen was the model for the no-nonsense working-class matriarch played in drag by her 10th and youngest child Brendan O'Carroll. "People always ask is Mrs Brown based on your mum and I used to say no but then I started to realise that actually she is," says the 58-year-old actor, playwright and novelist.

What is more remarkable is that this indomitable former novice nun went on to get elected to the Irish parliament - the first female MP for the country's Labour Party. She became shadow foreign affairs minister and chief whip. In a long career as an activist she overturned a law banning married women from working as civil servants and passed another to have the word "illegitimate" removed from birth certificates.

She had 11 kids so obviously she was right to doubt her vocation

Brendan O’Carroll

She was born in 1913 to parents Michael and Lizzie McHugh, who had planned to elope to America and had tickets on the Titanic's illfated maiden voyage. They sold them at the last minute when Lizzie's parents were finally reconciled to their marriage.

The policeman who bought their tickets survived the disaster but his young wife drowned.

Michael McHugh was a Gaelic-speaking freedom fighter who contracted TB while imprisoned by the British and died aged 48. With the help of an IRA fund to educate the children of men who gave their lives to the Irish cause Maureen was sent to a boarding school in County Mayo to be taught by nuns.

She went on to University College Galway as a novice nun but renounced her vows. "She had 11 kids so obviously she was right to doubt her vocation," says her youngest son. She got her degree and became a language teacher.

Believing passionately in education she was horrified to be sacked after she married Gerry in 1936 under an arcane law that said no woman civil servant could be married.

She joined a union, campaigned against the law and, developing a taste for activism, founded the Lower Prices Council, which campaigned against high prices, scarcity and black marketeering after the Second World War. In 1954 she was elected to the Dáil, Ireland's parliament, where she pioneered the admission of women to the police and also campaigned on social issues.

Brendan with his wife Jenny [ALAMY]

"Ireland at the time was in the Middle Ages and it was actually legal for a husband to beat his wife with a stick, so long as the stick wasn't longer than his forearm. My mother helped change all that," Brendan has said.

She was in Parliament for only three years, losing her seat in 1957 (and losing Gerry to cancer the following year). "When she retired from politics she had a few bob and we were convinced we were in the lolly but she bought a couple of houses and turned them into homes for battered wives and homeless children in which we all volunteered," her son says.

She died in 1984, eight years before Brendan wrote a radio sitcom called Mrs Browne's Boys (she had an 'e' in those days), which was broadcast daily on the Irish station 2FM. He also made his ferocious matriarch the central character in a best-selling novel called The Mammy, which had three sequels. There was no drag element: she was played by Anjelica Huston in a 1999 film Agnes Browne.

The novels were adapted into a touring stage version and Brendan became Mrs Browne when the actress due to play her called in sick. He says he sat down at a dressing-room mirror, put on a wig, pencilled in a mole on his chin and said: "F*** me, it's me mammy!" The TV show, which first aired on the BBC in 2011 and won a Bafta for best sitcom despite being slated by snootier critics, is now a family affair.

Jenny Gibney, who plays Mrs Brown's daughter Cathy, is Brendan's second wife. His son Danny plays ne'er-do-well Buster while Danny's childhood best friend Paddy Houlihan is Mrs Brown's son Dermot.

Danny's wife Amanda plays Mrs Brown's daughter-in-law Betty, and screen daughter-in-law Maria is played by Brendan's daughter Fiona. Brendan's sister Eilish plays Mrs Brown's best friend Winnie and his real grandson Jamie plays screen grandson Bono.

IT'S part of the joke that we know this lot are all related in real life and frequently they come out of character to fall about laughing. Producer Stephen McCrum has said it was hard to get clearance for a show that used the F-word - albeit the Irish version with an "e" - 34 times in the first 30-minute episode. But it appeals to a studio audience that is close to Agnes in age and the only people it seems to shock are self-conscious metropolitan sophisticates.

There have been suggestions in the Irish press that the foulmouthed Mrs Brown is an unfitting memorial to an extraordinary social reformer. But it's clear that some of Maureen's eccentricities were worthy of her fictional alter ego.

For example Maureen once told her daughter Eilish: "God didn't make you very beautiful but he made you ever so lovable."

Like Mrs Brown she would also put on a posh voice answering the phone and once when she was given a new fridge it functioned for a whole year as an ordinary cupboard because she didn't realise it was meant to be plugged in.

For Brendan, who has made millions performing Mrs Brown on tour and selling the TV version internationally, it's clear that Agnes is his mother without the education and that Maureen herself was an inspiration.

"She was a powerhouse of a woman, a woman for change," he said on the Graham Norton Show last week. "She taught me, 'Don't be afraid to fail, don't be afraid to succeed, don't be afraid to try. And it's not what you have but what you do with what you have'."