We know her as Young Offenders mum Mairead in the hit series. Hilary Rose opens up about motherhood and how she can relate to her character.
It’s often said that a typical Irish mammy will love her children no matter what they do and that’s certainly true for Mairead MacSweeney, the put-upon mother of Conor in hit TV series The Young Offenders.
Asseries four of the showis in full swing, Hilary Rose, who plays Mairead, says she can understand exactly where her character is coming from.
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Hilary has two children with her husband, The Young Offenders creator and director Peter Foott. At five and eight, they are happily unlikely to get into as much trouble as her screen offspring but she can still identify with the power of a mother’s love.
‘It’s lovely because that is the very core of Mairead,’ she says. ‘She is always in Conor’s corner no matter what and I love that because that is the way you are for your kids.
‘I feel for the character actually because sometimes she just gets so weary about all his actions and misactions but at the end of the day there is always that sense of support and love that she has for him.’
This series started off (spoiler alert) with Conor coming out of prison but already he has made some dramatic changes and Hilary knows there are kids out there who might just need an adult to go out to bat for them the way Mairead does for Conor.
Her own children are still very small but Hilary says becoming a mother has changed her life completely. She tries to be at home as much as she can and aims to work in the morning so that she can be free in the afternoon to spend time with the children.
‘For me, motherhood has been the single most important journey of my life,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I would have made the changes I made or did the soul-searching I have done and continue to do if my kids didn’t show up.
‘I always say they are my two little healers. I think it has changed me profoundly in ways that sometimes I can’t even recall, logically anyway. A mother’s love is unbreakable.’
Like any other parent, she is juggling work and the rest, and says good scheduling is the key to getting things right. ‘If we have blocks of filming where it’s all day, I will try to do two to three days in a row then a day off so I get to spend some time with them,’ she says. ‘Or they come on to set sometimes too and do little visits.’
Outside acting, Hilary has her website and podcast series Live Wild, of which a new series is coming soon. It’s about reconnecting with nature and using the world around us as a source of wellness and finding the joy in our lives. ‘Because it’s called Live Wild I have always asked the question: What do you do every day to live wild and free? I love that question and I always get really varied answers,’ Hilary says.
So what does Hilary do every day to live wild and free? ‘There’s a combination of things,’ she says. ‘I have these little rituals — and a ritual can be just having a cup of tea in the morning. I love that, I drink a little cup of cacao every morning and have a minute to myself before the madness kicks off.
‘If I am feeling a little stressed out I tend to go out and walk in the woods. I used to sea swim a lot but sometimes I think it’s just too cold. The water is getting warmer now and it is becoming more tolerable but walking in the woods is my wild and free now.’
Hilary took on a different kind of role during the pandemic when sheturned up as Alanna in Smother, a role she says she was grateful to have as filming was allowed. But she’s not going to be leaving her native Cork any time soon for the bright lights of Hollywood.
She says: ‘I find myself in a really positive space where I feel lucky that I can decide if a project is the right thing at the right time. I base those decisions around my family life. If a project came up in America and it was the right thing at the right time for my family, yes I’d absolutely do it.
‘Am I out there chasing Hollywood stardom? Not actively. I love Ireland and I love my life here. My kids are growing up and I wouldn’t uproot them and we are doing really well.
‘We have a great support system in a great neighbourhood and our family is here. Family is everything, community is everything. We have had a lot of isolation over the last number of years and I think that helped to show family is so important, so to remove my kids from that would feel unnecessary.’
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