Will these two panto legends make up? Oh no they won’t

AS FALLINGS-OUT go, the one between Rory Cowan and Twink is as bitter as they get and, when asked about it yesterday, the former Mrs Brown’s Boys star made his feelings clear to the Irish Daily Mail.

‘There is unbelievable bad blood between us,’ he said. ‘I want nothing to do with that woman.

‘You know the way it is with things that get said but that can then never be unsaid? She has said them about me.’

Among the things she has said about him is that he is a ‘rat’. It is not entirely clear why she branded him as such – she called him ‘Rory the rat’ in an interview with The Sun newspaper earlier this year – but it all appears to stem from a planned TV show on RTÉ to restart Twink’s career.

He claims he managed to get her a pilot and an option for six episodes based upon a Reeling In The Years-type programme about her time working as an entertainer.

However, he says that despite him getting a crew in place – including a BAFTA-nominated director – it stalled.

He says when she wanted her own personal assistant, he pointed out there wasn’t a budget for one and she would have to pay for one herself. Meanwhile, she had issues with clips that had been selected for the pilot, he claims.

Then in May 2017, Rory says he walked away from the project. ‘I was trying to help her get back on her feet,’ he said last night. ‘At the time, she was running a cake business and I believed she needed to get back into TV to make some money. But when all the issues arose over the pilot, I just decided I’d had enough and wished her well with it.’

In response, he claims Twink lashed out and later accused him of having ‘deserted her’ and dubbed him ‘Rory the Rat’. He feels it was uneccessarily harsh after he had dipped into his own pocket to save her house.

Before the idea for the pilot came up, Twink had been ordered to sell her palatial home or clear mortgage arrears. But in January 2017, news emerged that she could keep €1.2million Idrone House because she had paid off €18,000 arrears.

At the time, nobody knew it was Rory who had stumped up the cash. Also, nobody knew he paid her €209.80-a-month mortgage for a number of months on top of the lump sum he paid out.

In addition, he claimed to the Irish Daily Mail last night he gave her €5,000 spending money, suggesting she could live on €1,000-amonth for five months while her mortgage was being paid off.

All seemed well between the two old friends until the pilot stalled. Rory says the fall-out steadily got worse when he landed a top panto role in Christmas 2017.

He had been asked to replace Al Porter, who quit amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour. However, in response, he told The Sun Twink penned him a ‘vicious’ 19page letter. In it, she told him: ‘To add insult to injury, you’re now working instead of me for Xmas.

‘In my role, in my shoes, in my job – in my Olympia Theatre. ‘And they say there’s a God.’ Such is the acrimony between them, it spilled onto the steps of the church where the funeral Mass for Rory’s late mother was held on Thursday. He believes she may have turned up to try to effect some kind of a reconciliation, but such is the anger he still feels, he told her to go away.

‘To use my mother’s death as a reason to try and reconcile – that is not on,’ he later told the Irish Daily Mail. ‘I mean, if you had any decency at all, you wouldn’t turn up at a funeral to try and use it to try and repair a falling out. Not the type of falling out we had.

‘And if she wanted to acknowledge the death as she said she did, she could have just sent a note. She has sent me a number of vicious letters already in the past, so she has my address.’

With the season of goodwill nearly upon us, you might think the two panto stars could – in fine panto tradition – put their bitter feud behind them. But with such an unseemly display in public view on Thursday it seems unlikely.

‘Helping her to get back on her feet’