I wanted to have a baby for Daniel – but I’m grateful now
MAJELLA O’Donnell says she wished she could have provided her husband Daniel with an heir.
The former music manager has told how she wanted to give husband Daniel O’Donnell a child when they married 16 years ago, but she is ‘so grateful’ now that it didn’t happen for them.
‘I suppose I wanted it more so for Daniel. I’d had my kids, I wasn’t too bothered. I would have loved to have given him a child. I was 42. We didn’t do anything to prevent it and nothing happened. It was kind of like it wasn’t meant to be. Now, I am so grateful, I am really grateful that I haven’t got a baby or a 15-year-old,’ she says.
Majella was speaking to Brendan O’Connor in his new interview series, Time Out, which debuts on RTÉ One on Friday at 9.35pm. The three-part series will feature indepth, one-on-one interviews with high-profile people.
Majella is the first celebrity to face the presenter. She admits that even members of her own family expressed surprise when, as a divorced mother of two, she started dating the crooner.
She tells O’Connor that O’Donnell, 56, ‘is fabulous’ with her daughter Siobhán’s two young children. ‘Getting up in the middle of the night, changing the poo-iest nappies, feeding them… He’s real hands on,’ she tells O’Connor.
‘I said to [O’Donnell], “God, it is such a shame that you didn’t have your own children, you would have been a great father”, and he said: “No, Majella, I wouldn’t… I would have been on tour because that is what I wanted to do.”’
And she tells O’Connor that when, in the early days of her relationship, she told her sister she was dating the Donegal man, her sister ‘couldn’t stop laughing’. She went on, ‘I was like “What are you laughing at?” and she said: “If you’d have come home and told me you were going out with the guy from Meatloaf I would have thought really? Wow! But for you to come home and say you are going out with somebody like Daniel, that quiet, doesn’t drink?” She said, “I just can’t put the two of them together”.’