Growing Up Byrne: Family, Fame, And The Irish Arts

A Christmas panto tradition, the hum of RTÉ corridors, and the soft thud of a monitor on a kitchen table—Crona Byrne’s life moves between stage lights and the toughest kind of caregiving. We open with the joy she inherited from Gay and Kathleen Byrne: toy show auditions buzzing with dance teachers and brave kids, Maureen Potter memories, and the gentle Irish habit of saying hello and moving on. Then the lens widens to honour Kathleen’s own career—Arts Council work, poetry, and a harp carried into hospitals and charity halls.

The centre of gravity shifts as Crona shares her family story with startling candour: miscarriage, emergency C-sections, and the nightly drill of infant apnea. That practice in crisis becomes the backbone for what follows—Philip’s early-onset frontal lobe dementia at 57. She maps the subtle signs, the tests that didn’t add up, the diagnosis that did, and the relentless pace since. There’s the sting of friends who vanished, the relief of the few who stayed, and the practical lifelines the Alzheimer Society offers when the HSE doors finally open. The advice is grounded and real: keep knocking, ask for day units and activity sessions, take the walk when the carer arrives, and don’t try to carry it alone.

We also roam the Irish arts that shaped her: Audrey Hepburn’s grace without entourage, Pierce Brosnan greeting crew by name, and the complicated handovers at the Late Late when one era gives way to another. There’s U2 gifting a Harley that gave Gay new freedom, Riverdance runs where Crona worked backstage, and a childhood moment feeding what she thought was a cat—until the bottle met a tiger cub. The thread through all of it is simple and strong: art as community, kindness as practice, and love as work worth doing.

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