Journalist and now playwright Fiona Looney finds inspiration for her work in the fraught world of mammying, she tells Hugh Linehan
Fiona Looney arrives into the RTÉ canteen fresh from her weekly stint on The Gerry Ryan Show, and freely admitting to the touch of nerves which all journalists feel when the tables are turned and they're the ones being interviewed.
"I was afraid The Irish Times would send John Waters," says the 39-year-old journalist with tongue firmly in cheek.
With her first book just published, and her first play due to open in two weeks' time - "Of course it's just one of those coincidences" - Looney is already a familiar face and voice to Irish audiences. But, given the similar themes of both book and play, she seems set fair to become the modern voice of that rather impressive figure, the Irish Mammy.
Her play, Dandelions, was sparked by some of her own experiences in the field of mammying.
"I came into it from the point of view that there had been quite a lot written and done about the women who have it all, who juggle it all, with the career and the kids and all that kind of thing," she says.
"My own experience straddles both worlds. At the moment it's a bit odd, but normally I'm only out of the house for an hour on a Tuesday morning and an hour on a Thursday morning, when the kids are usually at school, so effectively I'm at home full-time. I have no childminder or any of that."
It was while standing in the schoolyard that she became intrigued, she says, "by all these women who meet up there twice a day for about two minutes".
"The same conversations all the time, one of which is inevitably about the washing. These are intelligent, educated women of my age - and I include myself very much in all this. Planning your day around the washing machine. I quite like that ritual.
"But then, coming into that group come the mothers who work. They're very conspicuous, first of all because they're wearing a suit and they have make-up on. Everyone else is in the closest approximation to their nightwear that they can get away with. I would have a lot in common with those women because I do have a job, but I was aware of a frisson between the two groups."
It was that tension between the two camps that she took as a premise for a play, but she found her focus changing.
"I thought I would find the women who juggled more interesting, but actually, when I really started exploring, it was the women who stayed at home that I was more fascinated by," she says. "The fact that a lot of them would be women of my age, for whom the idea of giving up work to have kids was never presented as an option."
DANDELIONS, SET IN a suburban Dublin housing estate during a hot summer, tells the story of Noirín and Jean (Pauline McLynn and Deirdre O'Kane), neighbours and best friends, whose domestic security is torn asunder by the arrival of a new couple.
"One is blissfully happy to be a housewife and doesn't find the term offensive; the other one can barely say the word because it's so politically loaded for her," says Looney. "They're best friends and the play is the journey they take together."
She agrees that, on the face of it, the subject matter is apt at the current political moment.
"But the play isn't political at all," she says. "I'm horrified that people might think it's worthy. It's not by any means a polemic. It's a story about friendship first and foremost, with a few jokes in it."
For a first-time playwright, she acknowledges, she couldn't have hoped for a better cast and production team. McLynn and O'Kane are joined by Dawn Bradfield and ex-Boyzoner Keith Duffy. The play is produced by Anne Clarke and directed by Michael Caven, with design by Joe Vanek and lighting by Rupert Murray.
Looney has been working as a journalist since the 1980s, mostly in Dublin, but with a seven-year interregnum in the 1990s when she followed her husband-to-be, Steven, to London, where she worked for the BBC and the Sunday Times. Apart from her general feature writing for the Sunday Tribune, she has been chronicling the progress of her three children, Ciara, Cian and Uainín (described, respectively, as The Small Girl, The Boy and The Toddler) in an engaging and often hilarious weekly column over the past eight years. Surely there must be weeks when she really doesn't want to be sharing her domestic travails with thousands of people?
"Well, yes, sometimes, but then somebody like Róisín Ingle comes along," she says. "I hide behind my kids in a way. There isn't a hell of a lot of me in there. There's my family, and a certain dynamic at work. I think what Róisín does is far braver than that. I've only met her once, but there's times I've read her column and at the end of it I'd feel like ringing her and asking her: 'Are you okay? Do you want to talk?' "
A selection of the columns has just been published as a book, Misadventures in Motherhood. What do the children make of it all?
"Oh, none of them read it. Ciara's eight and would be more aware of it than the other two. She hates being called The Small Girl, that's her only real bone of contention. That said, they loved having their photo taken and going to the launch. Cian said to me the other day: 'Am I a bit famous now?' "
Dandelions opens at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Nov 3. Misadventures in Motherhood is published by The O'Brien Press