Much of my childhood was spent feeling starved of the attention I surely deserved. There being eleven of us meant we were all getting less direct adulation than most children, and then my mother was cruelly withdrawn for ever, cutting that already meagre ration in half. I should have realised this was a problem for each of my siblings, but in my head no one had it as bad as me. For one thing, I came late in the pack, arriving at a time when my parents were so used to small children that the lustre of yet one more was probably somewhat diffused. I figured this alone started me off with something of a handicap. My older siblings had enjoyed fractionally more attention, and for longer periods, as they had each constituted a greater overall percentage of the total stock until their immediate successor was born.
I began deploying a miser’s arithmetic to gauge this shortfall. Were one to use this metric – and, baby, I invented it – then as the ninth child simple mathematical logic meant my relative attention stats were at near-critical levels. The fact that my two younger siblings must therefore have more parlous stats than me was not something I deemed noteworthy. At seven, I was tabulating a mental index that catalogued every second of favour my siblings got at my expense, every shred of attention, sympathy or recognition. What was most galling was the fact that I was undoubtedly the most interesting member of my family, and by a long way. Why was Daddy so endlessly fascinated by, say, Mairead’s GCSEs or Maeve and Orla’s summer trip to America, but not the fact I’d seen a very large pigeon outside? Why was he putting so much time and effort into helping Shane or Dara prepare for university abroad, and yet so unenthused by my big news that sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs died out due to an asteroid impact in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula?
I bristled at being ignored like this, since I thought I had a good shot at leading the clan. Look at the facts: I knew hundreds of jokes cribbed from at least eighteen joke books, I could draw Sonic the Hedgehog freehand, and I’d read my way through the entire house so could always recommend amazing reads for the whole family – and even where to dodge the rude bits in Jackie Collins novels, by volume and page number, in case anyone was bashful about such things. On the physical side, I could jump right over the fence as long as I used one hand, and could regularly get to one hundred keepie-uppies, twenty if someone was watching. I mean, I was putting together a pretty impressive portfolio here, and it was getting me nowhere.
Reluctantly, I came to realise it was better to compare myself to my immediate contemporaries, focusing on the attention Caoimhe, Fionnuala and Conall received from Daddy. As Wee Ones we were the shakings of the bag, leftover bits of excess batter that clung between the folds of newspaper from the chippy order. This placed us in a different category of interest, for everyone. Evidently the closer you got to adulthood, the more interesting you became; which, considering how uniformly boring teenagers and adults appeared to be, seemed like a joke, and not one of the gut-busters from Jerry Chmielewski’s 1978 classic Jerry’s Joke Book: Crazy, Funny, Polish and other Ethnic Jokes, which I had read from cover to cover, and from which I could recite if you cared to ask. Worse still, this arrangement wasn’t merely unfair but wildly inefficient. I was the star player, sitting on the bench week after week. It was odd that life had designated me the sole protagonist of reality, then so wantonly wasted my talents.
It was probably, I surmised, a bit like neglect, and I almost certainly had it worse than any child who had ever lived, even those ones standing up in dirty cots wearing ratty jumpers in the fundraising ads for foreign orphanages. At least they were on TV. For a few days at the end of 1993, however, I too would find my way to the silver screen, when our home hosted an RTÉ camera crew. I was eight, I was irresistible, and I was not going to let my chance get away from me. This was the best thing that had ever happened to me, as is confirmed by the essay I wrote about it the next day in school, entitled ‘The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened to Me’. I was clearly at least marginally aware of how crass this might sound, so I began the essay with a little prologue, ‘The Sad Part’, which got the reader up to speed on the fact my mother had died, it was terrible, etc., etc. The meat of the thing was about how great it was that so tragic an event had led to me experiencing a few days as a screen star on Ireland’s national broadcaster.
Family Matters was a programme that dealt, appropriately enough, with all kinds of matters pertaining to families. Really boring Irish families. It was presented by two couch-dwelling presenters in loud outfits, who would throw to pre-taped reports on ‘issues’ and then circle back to the couch for follow-ups. Segments would include short pieces on, say, the rising price of school dinners, followed by a curt interview, in the studio, with the minister for education, in which she would say it was sad that school dinners were so expensive, and she’d look into it. Another segment would be about the difficulties of balancing work and home life, a topic illustrated with the story of a family in Roscommon that had to balance the demands of their llama farm with the extracurricular rigmarole of their kids’ passion for stilt-walking. They also did very worthy segments about tragic things that happened to families, and it was under this remit we were recommended, I presume by someone in Derry who had run out of friends to tell about our awful misfortune and fancied spreading the news further still. The word reached my father that RTÉ were interested, but he was reluctant, not least since this wasn’t the first time the media had come looking for an angle, and the previous occasion had not gone well.
In July 1992 we were featured in Take a Break, a weekly women’s magazine that specialised – in fact still specialises – in tacky and exploitative coverage of human-interest stories. Take a Break touts itself as ‘Britain’s bestselling women’s weekly’ and it has, if anything, become odder since we were in it. ‘I dug up my fella’s secret lover INSIDE OUR HOUSE’, and ‘DEMON STRUCK as we PEELED POTATOES’ being two recent examples of cover stories. To make the whole effect even more queasy, each cover features a smiling woman who is not a celebrity or the subject of any of the stories featured, but rather a model they’ve hired to fill space that would otherwise be blank. I am moderately obsessed with these women and the function they perform. Take a Break know what they’re doing, so there must be a reason why she’s there. Presumably their research shows that people are so used to seeing smiling women on magazine covers that it simply doesn’t matter if the person in question is uncoupled from all of the horror and insanity around her. The cover woman is some form of basic avatar with whom the reader can identify. Self-possessed, sunny, aspirationally pretty but not unrelatably so, and nearly always turning to look lovingly outward, promising you, dear reader, that buying this magazine could make you stare delightedly at strangers, just like she does. Her bright clothes and wide smile are drastically at odds with the macabre and unsettling messaging around her. She creates the impression that this reader’s friend is herself the person to whom these stories refer, and is thus the woman whose ‘cruel hubby STUFFED a dying girl into a SUITCASE’, or had ended up, oh cruellest of fates, ‘PREGNANT by MOSQUITOES’. Therein lies the magazine’s timeless appeal for those who love sensationalism and schmaltz, or just something sufficiently unhinged that it might take their mind off an impending root canal as they sit in a dentist’s waiting room.
In our case, we were very much the other type of story that the magazine offers: maudlin tales of adversity that just about approximate real events. These remove every scintilla of complexity and nuance from a person’s life story and mulch the whole thing into a frictionless pap digestible by any reader, no matter how unbothered by detail or distracted of mind. There was nothing here that would demand more than 3 per cent of the brain power God gave a tapeworm. I imagine the hope among the editorial team was that they could one day write a story so blandly, effortlessly readable that its broadest details could be gleaned by someone who’d just been kicked in the head by a horse. This they did with the story of my mother’s death, under the sickly-sweet headline ‘For the Love of MUM’.
‘Gripping her husband Joe’s hand, Sheila O’Reilly pulled him close. “Promise me you’ll look after the children. Bring them up so I’d be proud,” she said.’
My mother had, of course, never said anything of the sort, or at least Daddy had never mentioned it, perhaps out of a fear it would ruin our perception of her as someone who spoke to people in the way human beings generally do. The problems, alas, were not limited to those of taste, but of mind-boggling inaccuracy. Take a Break gave my mother’s job as marriage counsellor, when she was a teacher. They quoted us referring to her as ‘Ma’, ‘Mum’ and ‘Mummy’, which impressively enough were all terms for Mammy that we would never have used in a million years. ‘Ma’ in particular seemed like an insulting flash of improvisation that suggested our English correspondent imagined us speaking with a catch-all Oirish lilt, some way north of Darby O’Gill. They misspelled three of our names and forgot about Shane entirely. Most impressive of all, however, was the following passage:
As Joe fell into a troubled sleep in bedroom number two of the bungalow, the children were still awake. Maeve and Orla, the identical twins, had their heads together. ‘Sinead’s doing three A-levels,’ said Maeve. ‘She won’t have much time.’ ‘And Dara’s in the middle of his GCSEs,’ added Orla. ‘The others are too young,’ said Maeve. One by one they ticked off their brothers and sisters. The solution was simple. ‘That leaves us,’ they agreed. They waited until dawn, climbed out of bed and got dressed.
When Joe came down the stairs the next morning he stood still in the hallway and stared into the kitchen, blinking in astonishment. The place was spotless, the breakfast things neatly laid out. ‘Hey, and what’s this?’ he asked, eyeing a chart on the wall.
‘That’s the rota,’ chorused Maeve and Orla. ‘We’ve worked it out. Sinead and Dara are excused as much as possible because of their exams.’ Joe ran his eye down the list; dishwashing, dusting, vacuuming, and laundry. The twins had thought of everything.
This short segment contains so many painfully notable moments it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, my father and sisters seem to be communicating through the kind of expositional dialogue that suggests they’ve just been parachuted into their own lives and need to take stock of things and people they’ve known intimately for, in my sisters’ case, their whole lives. For another, unless confined to prison or on an oil rig, human beings generally don’t sleep in numbered bedrooms. But what is possibly most notable about this passage is something you might not even have caught. The writer managed to describe the first bungalow in the history of architecture to possess a set of stairs.
The factual points were, of course, entirely secondary to the tone and style of the thing, which left such an acrid taste in our mouths that even now, thirty years later, it makes us angry. It was grisly to think of other people reading this mawkish bollocks and taking it as some true statement about our lives. It seemed inhuman that they were even allowed to turn our story into a tawdry bit of sentimental fluff for people to tut along to and say how sad. It’s a fear I entertain myself whenever I ask my family for details of this or that part of my life story, since it is invariably a part of theirs too. None of this dissuaded my dad from taking part in Family Matters, though, perhaps because RTÉ were a much more respectable outlet, or maybe just because the presence of cameras would make it harder for them to lie about us having stairs.
At the time, it didn’t seem strange that a TV show was coming to tell the story of my family’s bereavement. It’s surreal to think that, conservatively, tens of thousands of people must have watched a segment about my home life, and we all just went about our business afterwards. I can see that our story was sufficiently family-focused to fit on a show that was primarily about family matters, but I find it hard to work out why such a show existed in the first place. I’ve never seen anything since with a remit that uninspiringly specific. Everyone has a family, the logic may have gone, so let’s create this oddly stilted, low-stakes parish newsletter television programme that was like a busybody bulletin board for parents around the country and a platform for people to complain about the frustrations of family life. It was a bit like Crimewatch, if the only crimes they covered were people charging too much for textbooks, bad parking near playgrounds and the hassle of school uniforms going tatty after a couple of washes.
None of this mattered to me at the time since, as far as I was concerned, I had pretty much been cast as the lead in a new Die Hard film. The crew descended at some point in December 1993 and I quickly made a nuisance of myself. You can see it was December because, even though the show was eventually broadcast in the spring, the footage clearly shows our Christmas decorations everywhere. This became an oddly persistent point of reference for anyone who would later see the show. ‘Saw your Christmas decorations there, in the background!’ they’d say, in a tone that suggested they’d foiled our cunning ruse. ‘Yes, it was filmed at Christmas,’ we’d say, never really shaking the sense that they considered us very neatly caught out. The crew were in our house for about eight hours over two days, and the premise of the segment was simple enough; my dad and my eldest sister Sinead spoke to camera about my mother’s illness and death, and then Maeve and Orla discussed their famous rota, which had made them stars of print and now made its TV debut.
It should be stressed just how much celebrity this conferred upon them. Their teacher nominated them for a Young Citizen’s Award, which they won, and which eventually saw them travel to London for the presentation. There, alongside people who’d raised money for epilepsy drugs or rescued dogs from disused mines, they attended a lavish ceremony and even got to meet Northern Irish funnyman Frank Carson, a fixture on local TV during the exact period of time when comedians still went by ‘funnyman’ in the tabloids.
It was undoubtedly true that Maeve and Orla took on a huge amount of work themselves when they really were too young to do so. For this, they received praise from teachers – and TV funnymen – but also near-constant ribbing from their siblings, who quite unfairly discerned in their efforts a certain self-importance.
Because we were (and still are) a mercilessly sarcastic shower of cynics, for years afterwards their award became a byword for deluded self-congratulation and was recalled exclusively in mocking tones. This ignored the fact that, eight weeks after our mother’s death, they spent the run-up to Christmas making trips out to the caravan in our back garden, scouring Argos catalogues so they could source and collect all of our Christmas presents. They’d worked out Santa wasn’t real only the year before, meaning they had, in some sense, lost Santa and Mammy within twelve months, and were now being asked to perform some of the functions of both. Looking back now, it seems odd that this job fell to two eleven-year-olds, considering a fifteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old were also available, but the logic behind it was never really explained to me. It was said that the older kids were too focused on exams, but the few weeks before Christmas aren’t exactly fever pitch for scholastic activities. In any case, the twins did it. And, in return, we teased them for decades afterwards.
While the film crew, like everyone else, centred their focus on my older siblings, I made myself busy behind the scenes, picking up cables and peering through cameras in a way that suggested this was my fourth shoot this week, but with a punctilious edge that implied I thought standards were slipping. I would repeat things I heard them say, as if I too thought we needed a brighter lamp for the kitchen shots, and had myself just been thinking they needed to hurry up with the externals before evening set in. When they started keeping their conversations, and equipment, away from me, I brought out the big guns: telling tantalising dinosaur facts just within earshot of those crew members who seemed the most discerning, hoping to bait them into asking for the full experience.
‘Hey kid,’ I imagined they’d shout, lowering a boom mic so as to focus more intently, ‘what was that you were saying about the wingspan of a pterosaur?’ This never came to pass. I eventually gained better access by going straight to the top and shadowing the producer, Marion. I think I can say she would have been completely lost had it not been for the guided tour of the house I offered, entirely free of charge, listing every room and its contents in a detailed but efficient way, giving her the basics of each in well under forty minutes. She must have found my incessant questions very enlightening, since she seemed anxious to get through as many of them as she could as quickly as possible, and was always telling me how little time she had. I was particularly interested in what, exactly, a producer did (many things), how many things she’d produced (plenty) and if a producer was more important than the director (they were, according to Marion). I also wanted to know if she had one of those director’s chairs, and if it was called a producer’s chair, and if I could have one, and if she’d ever filmed a volcano, or in space, or if this would be shown in America, and if she had ever been to America, and if I should go to America to maximise my potential as a TV star. She let me wear headphones and look at the notes for the production, and showed me other tips and tricks of the trade. It was the first time I’d ever seen that ‘let’s wrap this up’ gesture TV people use for segments that are going on too long, when she made one towards a cameraman as a way of telling him to stop letting me look through the viewfinder for the eightieth time that day.
It was exciting to have these people in our house, but also mildly unnerving. Occasionally, I’d be aware of them moving something, a pot or a fruit bowl, so it wouldn’t be in frame. This was probably just so the viewer’s eye wouldn’t be distracted by something in the background, but I took it to be a judgement on the feng shui of our home, as if it were unimaginably gauche to have a fruit bowl on a countertop when it was so better suited to being on the table instead. I made mental notes of their decisions and for years afterwards would unconsciously make these same adjustments if I passed, say, a cup that was too close to the television, or three chairs packed tightly together when it would be more aesthetically pleasing for them to be ever so slightly spaced out.
In reality, I guess they tiptoed around me because our story really was that sad, and they were probably very moved, if not moderately freaked out, by how excited I was to be part of all of this. They may also have been wondering just how best to get closer to this marvellous young man who surely had such a huge career ahead of him; to nurture his genius, or maybe hang on to his coat tails and follow him to fame and fortune. I expected immediate stardom and requests for paid work doing public appearances; opening youth centres, doing in-store events at shopping malls, that kind of thing. I imagined myself being charming and precocious on late-night chat shows and studiously refusing to mention my siblings unless they were extra nice to me in the days beforehand.
All I wanted was to be something like a low-level god, pampered in easy wealth and adored by everyone I met. Like most children, I had watched the careers of child actors like Macaulay Culkin and Mara Wilson and seen a template I wanted to pursue for myself. I had little to no interest in, nor aptitude for, anything in the dramatic line. It’s just that unlike, say, medicine or international finance, acting seemed like something for which children could be famous. I figured I’d just sort out the work side of the deal later, while keeping the fame and fortune part as my guiding light. Besides, it seemed obvious that most child actors weren’t particularly good, so I could leverage my appeal on my amazing personality and all this wisdom I was picking up about shot choices, light rigs and cup placement.
I barely made an appearance in the eight-minute final cut. I was in a few group shots, and one heavily staged sequence in which we were filmed walking out of our front door on the way to school. As I’ve said, no one used the front door of our house except visiting priests or doorknockers, so this had a perverse ring of falsity I found incredibly thrilling. Here we were, acting. As ourselves, of course, but acting nonetheless. This brief walk to school in our uniforms – donned on a day when we weren’t even in school – struck a note of duplicity I found so exciting I reckoned I would never get tired of it, no matter how many BAFTAs I won. Unfortunately, my only other appearance of note was the one for which the show became notorious to all who watched it, in our family and out: a lamentable sequence in which Conall and I are shown kicking a ball around the garden. This wouldn’t have been too bad, except a combination of factors made it seem like a home movie shot in Chernobyl. For one thing, it was a particularly dismal December day – like I told the crew, shot choices are everything when you’re chasing the light – so both Conall and I were suffused with a grainy, greyish tinge. On top of that, we were wearing scuffed-up little dress shoes that suggested we probably didn’t have trainers, most likely because none had been dropped into our garden that week by a NATO helicopter. Lastly, there was the fact that it was not a football we were kicking, but a rugby ball, entirely deflated. This we paddled toward each other while attempting not to gurn at the camera, giving us the gormless effect of two rain-soaked peasant children taking a break from our labours by cheerily kicking an oblong leather bag filled with potato peel. It seemed as though a factory horn might at any moment call us back in for eight more hours at the smelting plant.
Friends of my father were quick to point out that we had been captured drinking out of mugs with no handles, and that a poem written by Caoimhe had been inelegantly fixed to the wall with masking tape rather than the more classy Blu Tack. These were, it must be understood, merely those comments they made to our faces. Lord knows what people said among themselves.
Watching it back now, twenty-five years later, I’m surprised we were so embarrassed since it was handled with a great deal more sensitivity than memory allows. The hosts were sympathetic and serious, and my dad conducted himself with incredible dignity and eloquence, not least when he described breaking down upon seeing my mother’s dead body for the first time. He’s remarkably comfortable in front of camera – my Hollywood biographers will likely say that’s where I got it from – and is incredibly moving in conversation, even maintaining his composure as he describes leaving the hospital room where she lay and re-entering it again on the off chance that something, somehow, would be different when he returned. These were memories I can’t remember him sharing, probably because I was too young to understand them. By the time I was old enough, the tape of the show had become an object of fear and horror in our house. Not because of the feelings evoked by his thoughtful words, but because we couldn’t bear to see ourselves portrayed as somehow poor or pitiful.
The eight-minute segment was part of an episode that was mostly taken up with a piece lamenting the price of schoolbooks. Our part done, we watched as the show moved on. A series of statistics were read out about just how massively the price of these books had increased in a few short years. A minister came on afterwards, declaring that the situation was indeed something that gave her grave concern, and said she would look into it.