Without Mullingar Arts Centre Neil Delamere might not exist

If it wasn’t for Mullingar Arts Centre, Neil Delamere might well not exist, the Edenderry-born comedian reveals ahead of his January 25 gig at the venue.

That’s because it was at that exact venue, back in the 1960s, that his parents met.

“My mother had a sister who lived in Mullingar,” he says, explaining that on a visit to her sister’s home at Mount Street Gardens, his mother headed out to ‘the County Hall’, as the arts centre was then known, and there she met the young John Delamere, a native of Belvedere Terrace.

The two married, settled in Offaly, had three children, and then after a gap, the youngest, Neil.

“I was definitely an afterthought!” he laughs.

The arts centre is familiar to him now: Neil has several times stood on the stage there, and is looking forward to going back.

“It’s about two years since I was there last,” he says, going on to describe how he likes the fact that when he performs in Mullingar there are probably several of his cousins up the back, and when the banter begins, he can drop in the local references, because as a kid, he spent time lots of time here, swimming at Lough Owel, and feasting on chips from The Roma.

This is the time of year when Delamere tours, fired this year with the material he prepared for and refined at a 25-night run at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

“From around October/November to April it’s live gigs,” he says.

“Edinburgh is a brilliant place to test the material because the audiences could be anyone, and if it works in Edinburgh, it will work for anybody”.

But all the time there’s lots of other stuff going on, and as Neil does an impromptu inventory of his radio and TV commitments, it’s difficult to keep pace with the mesmerising list of current, recent and impending projects happening both sides of the Irish Sea, many of them for the BBC.

Earlier this year, he gave up his Sunday morning show on Today FM after three years; he’s now notched up a couple of seasons on BBC NI’s popular ‘The Blame Game’; he is a regular panellist on Radio Scotland’s ‘Breaking the News’, including a transitioning-to-TV version of that show; he’s been on Radio 4’s ‘News Quiz’ and has just been involved in filming of a five-episode second series of the BBCNI mockumentary ‘Soft Border Patrol’, which is due to be broadcast around the time when Brexit happens.

Married since 2014, but guarded about his private life, Neil lives in Dublin. During his downtime he plays indoor soccer. He also loves walking, even more so when he has a dog to take with him.

“We foster dogs, until they get what they call ‘a forever home’ for them. We have a lurcher pup at the moment,” he says.

If he hadn’t found himself doing what he does now, Neil would probably have been living a more mundane, 9-5 existence, as after emerging from St Mary’s Secondary School in Edenderry, he headed to DCU to study computer applications – essentially programming.

While Edenderry didn’t have the equivalent of Mullingar Arts Centre, the school did stage musicals.

“But when I was 15 or 16 I wasn’t into it: I didn’t want to get up on stage and sing and dance and do any of that sort of stuff,” he says.

That said, after becoming a student in Dublin and becoming more exposed to theatre, he found his interests veering more in that direction and after just one year out in the world of programming, he went into entertainment. Rarely nervous now before a performance, he does remember how it felt to be nervous and when he encounters up and coming comics, he tries to encourage them and if they ask for it, give his take on how best to weather the nerves.

Very much a midlander, Neil even makes fun of the irony of having a Norman surname that means ‘from the sea’, while having roots in the most inland county of Ireland.

“There are more Delameres in Westmeath than in any other county,” he says.

His own particular line – from The Downs – is traceable back to the 1700s; but the name goes much further back than that in Westmeath: “It was a Delamere who founded Multyfarnham,” he has been told – and indeed it was a William Delamere who is credited with starting the abbey in 1306.

It would be fun, he speculates, to be the subject of a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ show.

While the roots may lie deep in Westmeath, Neil’s parents, John and Kay, had pragmatic reasons for choosing to make Edenderry their home: “My father worked with Bord na Móna, and they picked a place that was more or less equidistant from many of Bord na Móna’s facilities such as Mount Lucas, Lullymore, Derrygreenagh,” he says.

Kay, who had to give up her job at Dublin Corporation due to the marriage bar, and John both still live in Edenderry, but Neil’s two brothers and his sister, like himself, have moved away.

Without prompting, he says that as the youngest he did get spoilt and somewhat indulged, and adds that when he and his siblings get together for dinners or gatherings, they do have the craic. “No one is allowed to be too above themselves!” he jokes.