Mrs Brown’s Boys star Brendan O’Carroll has revealed he considered following in his mother’s footsteps and pursuing a career in politics, except he would have become a ‘dictator’.
The Dublin comic has enjoyed huge success over the past decade with his Irish matriarch character Mrs Brown.
The journey has been a long one for O’Carroll, as he spent many years trying to make it in comedy before he finally made it big.
Earlier in his career he considered going into politics as his mother Maureen had also done. She worked as a Labour TD for Dublin North-Central in the 1950s.
O’Carroll said: “Politics is in the family so what I used to say back then, ‘I will run for office when I have enough money and I don’t need to depend on the money it pays.’
“But when I got that sort of money, I decided, f**k that, I’m not going to be a politician. But had I decided to be a politician, I would have been an ‘Il Duce’ dictator’.
“I wouldn’t start negotiating with ministers, I would say this needs doing. Now get it done. Democracy doesn’t allow for that.”
“Try and pick a country that doesn’t have the same problem. A lot of it is down to politicians being in a bubble.
“In America, that bubble got burst the wrong way and they ended up elected a guy who they hoped would disrupt things but he disrupted things in a different kind of way.
“If you ask most politicians, they’ll tell you their re-election campaign starts the morning after their election.
“If we had a maximum of two terms, politicians would actually get everything done on their second term because they weren’t looking for re-election. They’d sort out the homeless and the hospitals.
“Instead every five years someone else comes in with a new idea and they change it, that just leads to waste and things getting overlooked.”
