The sister of Mrs Brown’s Boys creator and star Brendan O’Carroll has spoken about how shocked she was when her mam brought home her little brother.
Eilish O’Carroll said she didn’t even know her mother had been pregnant until she introduced her to baby Brendan.
Eilish stars as Mrs Brown’s best friend Winnie McGoogan in the hit show.
She told Virgin Media One: “I don’t remember much in my life but I do remember the day he was brought home from hospital because nobody told me that I was going to have a baby brother.
“Nobody said, ‘there’s a baby coming home’. I remember sitting on the side of the road, I even remember what I was doing.
“I had a lollipop stick and I was rolling a lollipop stick in a bit of muck to make a lollipop.
“My sister grabbed me, and I thought it was for a hiding because I was eating dirt. She said, ‘We have something to show you’.
“In I go. The room is full of adults and over on two chairs is a carrycot. My carrycot. I have my dolls in that carrycot. And my mother goes, ‘go and have a look and see what we got you’.
“So, I’m thinking, ‘it’s a new doll’. My body went into shock. Because the first thing I thought of was ‘that’s in my carry cot’.”
Eilish said that Brendan was their mam’s favourite as they were growing up but added that the siblings were very close.
She said: “As a kid I loved him. We got on really well and he was a very very funny kid.
“Obviously there was a lot of competition within the family anyway for my mother’s attention and my mother absolutely adored him.
“So, if there was ever an example of ‘I really don’t want this child’ changing this was it. Because he was her life.
“And that’s hard to take for all of us growing up because we’re thinking, ‘we’re all here mam’.”