On Christmas Eve of 2025, Dearbhla Mescal uploaded a photo to Instagram of a pile of shoes. The shoes were different styles – trainers, boots, loafers – and they belonged to the different members of her family: her husband, her two sons, her daughter. In the caption she said that she hoped everyone would have a Christmas filled with things as happy as seeing your family’s shoes, stacked by the front door.
This is something Mescal does often. She has 13,000 followers on Instagram and, with them, she shares various things that bring her joy. It’s simple stuff, normally: a jar of homemade lemon curd, a green wooden birdhouse, a heart-shaped stone on the beach.
She got the idea in 2011, watching her middle child, Donnacha, play football. Mescal was chatting to another spectating mother who told her she was knackered with everything – working full-time, raising children, watching rainy football games. Mescal understood: it was hard but, to deal with that trickiness, they both needed to find joy. She decided that, for the next 28 days, she would actively seek out small things that made her happy. Mescal has kept up the practice since, documenting her ‘joys’ online. Now, she is publishing her first book, Finding Joy, a collection of poems – or, as she calls them, ramblings – about being joyful.
Dearbhla with her son Paul Mescal at the 2023 Academy Awards
Besides the book, a lot has changed since that pitch-side chat. At 57, Mescal has: retired from a 30-year career in Ireland’s police force; been diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a type of blood cancer), had chemotherapy, and entered remission; and watched two out of her three children, Paul and Nell, become very well-known. The latter as a singer, who has released three EPs, supported Haim and Florence & the Machine on tour, and played the Royal Albert Hall. And the former as an actor, who, since his first-big role in Normal People, has been nominated for one Oscar, one Golden Globe, and four Baftas. ‘I’m really lucky. My children are happy. They are healthy,’ says Mescal, today. ‘As a mum, you can’t ask for more.’
She was born in Greystones, south of Dublin, and joined the Garda after she left school. It’s hard to imagine Mescal – currently wearing a yellow raincoat, walking around London’s Hyde Park, pointing out things she finds joyful like squirrels and crocuses – on the beat. ‘My old teachers, when I saw them, they’d go: “And what are you doing now? Are you a nurse?” And I’d say: “No, I’m a guard.” And they’d say: “A guard?”’
By 23 she had, she says, ‘given up on finding lads. I had just given it up. I had said to myself: “Oh, this isn’t working. Nobody’s dancing with me in the slow sets.”’ So, she got a part ‘dancing in the background’ of a local production of The Pirates Of Penzance. She wasn’t that keen on acting, but she thought she might make friends.
A 25-year-old primary school teacher called Paul was playing the lead, The Pirate King. During rehearsals, as the cast sat on the stage drinking tea, Paul The Pirate King plonked himself beside Mescal. ‘He leant against this upper part of my arm, and I immediately knew. He was my person.’ She pauses. ‘I was very lucky.’ The couple have been married for 32 years. (Mescal’s eldest son is, technically, Paul Junior.)
Paul with Dearbhla
They settled west of Dublin, in Maynooth, ‘because that’s where we could afford’, and had their first child (Paul) in 1996, their second (Donnacha) in 1999, and their third (Nell) in 2003. Alongside being a guard, Mescal, it seems, really liked being a mother. She remembers driving her children back from sports matches with their friends. They’d be smelly (‘there’s a really distinct smell you can only get pitch side’) and singing (‘it was always Katy Perry, California Gurls’).
Mescal would observe them, happily. ‘At that age, when they’re with their friends, they absolutely do not want you to do anything, except play the music loud and maybe stop at the shop and buy a treat,’ she says. ‘They just want you to be the silent passenger. And, actually, there is a real joy in being the silent passenger in your children’s lives.’
The household was ‘chaotic’ and creative – Paul (senior) had a piano and would write his wife pieces of music as presents – but Mescal herself is not an on the stage sort of person. ‘That part of my life is anxiety inducing.’ She is nervous about releasing the book.
‘It’s a big fear, you know: am I that interesting? I have no idea!’ But she’s motivated by her belief in the book’s message. ‘I do know that if you practise finding joy, it will make your life, on a daily basis, so much better.’
When their eldest son told them he might act, he said, clearly, he wanted to try it. ‘He didn’t know. Whereas the difference with Nell was [she said] I want to be a singer.’ Donnacha, the middle child, does not work in a creative industry but instead as a senior manager at a recruitment firm. ‘He wanted to be a rugby player, so he went to a rugby school. And he’s probably the bravest of all my children. Because he walked away from a school that he absolutely loved, with friends he loved, at a very young age – he was 16 – to try rugby at the next level.’
Normal People came out in 2020, during lockdown. At the time, Mescal’s son was 24 and living in London, anonymously, by himself. He rang her before the show’s premiere. ‘He was running in a park somewhere and he said: “It’s coming out tonight. Whatever way it lands, it’s not in my control.”’ She coninues, ‘He was kind of letting us know that this was going to change a little bit of our landscape.’ (Post Normal People, the Mescal parents also had to adjust to watching their child in sex scenes. ‘You know, real life [and sex] happens,’ she says. ‘And you’re sitting on your sofa, and you’re going: “OK, this is real life! This is our new normal.”’)
The whole family on Christmas Day
Their landscape has, indeed, changed. And it must be odd to have strangers watch and dissect your child. ‘I think none of us want anything written about our kids that isn’t: “They’re the best child in the whole world!”’ Reading fake rumours about Paul remains tricky, too. ‘I’m getting better at it. Let me tell you. But I do think: “What’s his granny going to think of that? Because it’s written there.” And I have to tell her – I have to ring my mother – and say, “That’s not real, he’s not gone to live in Australia,” or, “He’s not gone to live in Outer Mongolia,” or whatever it is. No. He’s, you know, plodding through his life. Same as all of us.’
And here Mescal stops, and points at a tree. ‘That tree has withstood, I don’t know how many eons of life in this park, and its roots are really strong. And my kids’ roots are really, really strong. So when things hit – like silliness or nastiness, or whatever you want to call it, even positivity – none of that actually matters, because the roots are strong.’
All three children live in London, and Mescal says it is her truest joy that they are close. Last summer, the trio went to Glastonbury; on Instagram, there are cheery photos of them dancing and smiling in tents.
The family gathers as often as possible (‘We have Christmas solidified in our diaries’) and speak a lot on the phone. Nell rings daily, often conducting calls while on a Lime bike, her phone banging around in the basket. ‘So I’m going: “You need to say that again because all I’m hearing is the cobblestone.”’
In the nicest, nicest, possible way, I’d wager most young people are mortified by their parents on social media. I ask Mescal about it. ‘Do my kids think I’m cringe? Absolutely. I embarrass them daily. But they’ve changed the word “cringe” to “cute”. I don’t know whether that’s generational, but they think I’m cute.’
The day before we meet, Mescal’s son was nominated for a Bafta for Hamnet. A month previously, he was nominated for a Golden Globe. His mother found out about the latter in perfectly unglamorous circumstances. She was at Liffey Valley, a Dublin complex of supermarkets and clothes stores, ‘literally doing the shop’, when a radio producer rang and asked if she would come on air to discuss ‘Paul’s good news’. Mescal – who’d had WhatsApp muted and hadn’t seen any texts – had no idea what he meant. ‘I went: “OK, yeeaaaah, I’m sure it is [good news]… What is it?!”’
She’s unsure if she’ll attend any awards shows this year (‘Paul is in his busy time, so we’ll see’), but, when he was nominated for an Oscar in 2023, the entire family travelled to LA alongside him. Gucci dressed them; Nell did her mother’s make-up. The experience was ‘surreal’, ‘extraordinary’, and ‘not for the faint-hearted’. Afterwards, ‘You sit on the plane home in your ordinary clothes, and you go: “OK, this is what [life] is really like – 10kg [hand luggage] and no more!”’
Those Oscars were also during Mescal’s cancer treatment and her doctors extended her chemotherapy so she could go. ‘It was my first time in Los Angeles, my first time doing that kind of extended flight, and it was all quite extraordinary.’ Back in Ireland, ‘I went in for my stem cell transplant.’
Cancer has made her ‘more present, more vulnerable and more willing to accept I can’t do it all’. Her husband was, she says, incredible throughout. ‘The same man who sat beside me on that stage, was then sitting on the bed beside me, rubbing my back in the dark, holding the sick bowl.’
And her children were, too. ‘I got [cancer] right in the middle of their excitement of life. It’s probably made them a bit more cautious about me and my health, I’m sure it has. But they see that I’m well. I’m able to do this walk – which I know sounds ridiculous, but last year I couldn’t have done this walk.’ She puts her yellow-coated arms in the air. ‘See! There’s a joy. This time last year, I couldn’t have done this.’
Paul (senior) retired in 2024 and the couple still live in the family home in Maynooth. They had two dogs called Bob and Jack, after the Kennedys, but now Bob and Jack have died and Mescal has banned further pets because she wants to travel. Last year, ‘I told the kids, when their dad turned 60: “Do not show up with a puppy.”’
When she spoke about going to the Oscars, Mescal said how happy those memories were: her family, in America, at an awards show, together. ‘Those big moments are great. But they’re once in a blue moon. You can’t be living on them!’ Instead, she says, she wants to live on smaller, everyday joys: a jar of homemade lemon curd, a green wooden bird house, a heart-shaped stone on the beach, a pile of shoes.
Finding Joy by Dearbhla Mescal will be published on Thursday (Bonnier, £12.99). To order a copy for £11,04 until 1 March, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
