Actress, writer, comedian, and star of Mrs Brown’s Boys, Eilish O’Carroll has told of the anger her eldest son felt at her for coming out as a lesbian so late in life.

O’Carroll planned on making a special trip back to the UK from Ireland, specifically to tell her three children who she maintained had some idea of her sexual orientation but needed to be told face to face:

“I knew in my heart and soul that they had an idea, but I had never uttered the words. I took them out for dinner and told them to box off a bit of time so I could talk to them alone (…) they had seen the warning signs and they didn’t make it easy for me to tell them on the night because they talked about everything else.”

The actress spoke of how her eldest son claimed to be ‘very very angry’ with her, not because of her sexual orientation, but because of her delayed journey to self-acceptance, keeping her true identity hidden from both her family and herself:

“He said that he wasn’t angry because I was gay, he told me that he already knew, he was angry because I never gave them the opportunity to be there for me before I left my husband. It wasn’t about trusting them, it was about my inability to accept myself.”

The star had been married on two separate occasions before coming out in her late 40s. O’Carroll maintains that her second husband is her “biggest supporter” and despite their strong relationship, her decision to leave the marriage was the decision to stop “undermining” herself:

““He was my second husband and we always said no matter what happened that we would always be there for each other.”

Today, she resides in Cork with her partner of 16 years Marian O’Sullivan.