‘My mum died of a broken heart after my niece was killed in crash’

STEVE WALL REVEALS FAMILY’S NIGHTMARE AFTER TODDLER DIED IN TRAGIC ROAD HORROR

ENTERTAINER Steve Wall believes his cancer-stricken mother died from a broken heart when his toddler niece died in a road crash.

The Stunning star can still remember the terrible day he was told that his beautiful niece Estlin had died after a truck ran into a car being driven by her dad Vinny.

“It was a beautiful sunny morning, like this, and I had dropped my daughter to school, and my mother called me from Limerick Hospital and she could hardly speak,” recalls Steve (62).

“She told me that there had been a crash. Vinny was taking his daughter Estlin to the creche. Vinny was in a coma and she said Estlin wasn’t going to make it. And it was just one of those calls that leaves you completely numb.”

The musician and actor recounts the details of the crash to presenter Brendan Courtney on RTÉ’s Keys To My Life.

“It was a truck driver attempting to overtake a coach full of tourists. It was basically somebody impatient doing something very stupid,” he says.

“I remember every minute of it. It was the year from hell, basically.”

Steve says his mum Patricia was traumatised by the accident and never fully recovered from the experience of losing her grandaughter.

“Our mother… she was absolutely devastated,” he recalls. “Everybody was, but she had cancer which had been treated successfully.

COMFORT

“But the cancer came back, and she was in bits after Estlin passed away, because she spent so much time with her. She minded her a lot. So, my mother basically, you know, she died from a broken heart.” Steve fondly remembers Estlin.

“She was a very vivacious little girl,” he says “Cute as hell. Just loved kind of performing, and dancing. Loved always coming over to the house and making pancakes with my mother, all that kind of thing. She was a little darling.

“She was just about a week short of her fourth birthday.”

When asked if he believes Patricia and Estlin are now together again, he declares: “Absolutely. I like to think that somewhere there’s a great comfort happening and that they’re both in each other’s arms.”

Steve is the eldest of Vincent and Patricia Wall’s five children and was born in London in 1962, after his Dubliner mum and Clare-born father met at an Irish club in the English capital.

His parents moved home to Ireland in 1967, where his dad got a job in Arnott’s department store and they lived in his grandfather’s house in Harold’s Cross.

“She was an amazing mother, she really was,” he says about his Liberties-raised mum, who died in 2018

“I remember actually there was one particularly dreary morning. We were all up. She was getting us ready for school. Then she just announced ‘you’re not going to school today’. She said ‘I’m going to take you round and show you my Dublin’.

“And she took us to all the places, St Patrick’s. That would have been her garden, St Patrick’s park. I would have been about 10. So she took us around all the places she grew up. We scattered some of her ashes down in St Patrick’s park. I often stop by there if I’m on my bike, and have a little chat with her.”

In 1974, his father decided to uproot the family and move them to his hometown of Ennistymon, Co Clare, to run his grandfather’s shoe shop.

Steve admits that having only had experiences of Co Clare while on summer holidays, he initially found his new life there quite challenging.

“I remember we had just one channel on the television. It was a black-and-white TV down at the back of the shop. Whereas when we were in Dublin we had Top of the Pops. So we were in shock,” he remembers.

“For the boys, there was the usual few challenges. A few scraps and all that. But then we call became best mates, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. The experience. It was tough in the beginning, it took us a couple of years to I think to settle in.

DAUGHTER

“But then we made friends and all that. Very much, I think Ennistymon formed me as a person, the whole experience. When people ask me where I’m from, I always say Clare.”

Steve bought the former family house in Harold’s Cross where he spent some of his initial childhood.

“I live here with my partner and my daughter,” he explains. “Bought it in 1999

and we moved in in 2000, Millennium. I never looked at any other house in Dublin because I just had such fond memories of this house.

“This is where I really discovered music for the first time, there was a great record collection here.”

Steve moved to Galway in 1980 to study mechanical engineering, but dropped out of college and joined the local arts scene as a musician and also worked behind the scenes in the Druid theatre.

In 1987, he and his brother, Joe, formed The Stunning, which became one of Ireland’s most popular bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In the programme, he visits a house near the Claddagh in Galway which he bought at the height of his fame in 1990 for IR£35,000. He’s surprised to see the new owners of the house have a copy of The Stunning’s second album.

“This came out in 1990,” he says. “Everything exploded in 1990. This album went to No1, it was No1 for five weeks, in the summer of 1990. It was like the summer of love, because it was the summer of Italia ’90 — so it was an incredible year in Ireland.

DIVERSE

“And I suppose we became pop stars in a way. Getting recognised everywhere. Getting followed around shops by schoolgirls and all that kind of thing,” he laughs.

“We had no record company. We paid for this album ourselves. We couldn’t get a music deal, because the band’s music, we were quite diverse and I think record companies didn’t know what to file us under.

“But the album went to No1 and stayed there for five weeks. Nearly every household in the country had it. It was a gamble and it paid off, it was great.”

The Stunning split up in 1994.

“We had seven years to get a record deal so that we could expand our touring horizons, but it didn’t happen,” he says.

“So, it was sort of frustration and kind of a bit of disappointment. And we decided ‘let’s call it a day’.”

Steve, who moved into acting 12 years ago when he won a role in Moone Boy, has had several films and TV roles since. He formed a new band with his brother Joe called The Walls and signed to Columbia records.

“That was when we thought ‘this is it, we’re finally getting to have a crack at the big time’,” he says. “We ended up signing a deal with Columbia as The Ghosts which was very apt because we were invisible and unseen for two years,” he sneers.

“We recorded so much stuff and they never released a single bit of it. They wasted two years of our lives.”

Keys To My Life is on RTÉ One tonight

‘I never looked at any other house in Dublin because I had such fond memories of this house’