Elaine Crowley

ELAINE CROWLEY presents Midday on TV3. She says: ‘I LOVE my mother Mary V dearly but she’s high maintenance and needs servants to go with her on holidays. Mary V is very ladylike, she doesn’t like to go to the bar, she likes to be waited on. She mammied ten of us so she deserves to be spoiled and she needs to be adored. My dad adored her and now we’re taking up the mantle.

In recent years we’ve gone on a lot of family holidays together to Spain, which have been great.

Usually I go with her to Lanzarote and my sister Mona comes too because Mary V needs more than one servant. But I think the holiday that stands out is when we went to Paris for her 70th birthday five years ago as a treat for Mam, because she loves it there.

I flew in from Dublin, the rest flew in from Cork, we stayed in Montmartre and had a lovely time. We went to a gorgeous little restaurant at the back of the Sacre Coeur, where we ate dinner, drank wine and sang her a happy birthday. Some of my sisters went to Eurodisney with the kids but I stuck around and did some of the usual sightseeing and people watching.

The t hing about going on holidays when you’ve a big family like ours is that there’s never a dull moment. We went to the Père Lachaise graveyard and my poor Auntie Angela fell and we ended up having to call an ambulance. For Mam’s 75th birthday recently, the whole lot of us went to Killarney. It was a surprise — she thought she was only going for the day with one of my sisters. She nearly had a heart attack when we all showed up. We stayed in the Fairview and had great oul’ craic.

That was nearly the nicest holiday because we were all together. You could go to the ends of the earth, but it’s all about who you’re with and not where you are.’