I’m mad and broke... but I’m happy
SINGER Mary Coughlan has admitted that she lives from gig to gig – but she has never been happier now that her drink demons are gone.
The Galway-born star has confessed that she has no pension, is plagued with the same financial worries as the rest of the country, and that her life is ‘quite insane’.
She said: ‘I’ve spent my money on things like my house, so I’m in the same position as everyone else with the same worries, except it’s worse because I’m 57 and I have no pension. I suppose I’ll have the State pension, if I’m working for three months and then doing nothing for three months. I’ve nothing left. I haven’t had a regular income in 30 years.
‘I went into the bank recently to sort out a few things and the only regular
‘I’m not normal by any stretch’
income I’ve ever had has been my children’s allowance for my youngest son, Cian. The money just isn’t there any more.’
In an interview in the new edition of Irish Country magazine, she admits to being seriously worried when she didn’t have any work for the first three months of this year.
However, she now has a tour lined up and is also part of the A Woman’s Heart collective.
The once hard-living Ms Coughlan has been clean of drink and drugs for two decades and confesses to not having led anything approaching a normal life. ‘I’ve done a lot of bridgebuilding since then, but there were some very dark days,’ she said.
‘I’m not normal by any stretch of the word. To be honest I’m probably quite insane. But I haven’t had one [drink] in 19 years. Everything that happened has been part of my journey. I was a different person until I hit 30, when the drink took over. I went around life the hard way, but I survived it.
‘It was really bad for eight or nine years. But it’s over now. There was a lot of pain to be worked through and a lot of healing to be done.’
Ms Coughlan also revealed how her feud with ex-husband Frank Bonadio and his then girlfriend Sinéad O’Connor, by whom he had a child, is well over and done with.
She said: ‘What’s the point in holding on to that stuff? If you stay bitter and twisted, nobody knows about it but yourself. The three of us have celebrated Christmas together for the last few years.’
And Ms Coughlan, who performs with A Woman’s Heart alongside Eleanor McEvoy and others in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre from August 28 to 31, said she is enjoying a long-distance love affair with her New Zealand boyfriend John Kelly, who she first met while touring Down Under.
She remarked: ‘I go over there, he comes over here. I work, he works – and it works.’