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.