Fairy doors are a cherished and beloved part of Irish culture, and wherever they are magic inevitably follows. But for the co-founders of The Irish Fairy Door Company, Niamh Sherwin-Barry and Aoife Lawlor, and their husbands Oisín and Barry, the intricate little creations brought them on a trail more magical than they could have imagined.
Niamh joined Ray D’Arcy to talk about the success and enduring appeal of fairy doors, informing him that "every second house in Ireland of children of a believing age" is the proud owner of the door to another world. With news that DHX, the second biggest animation house in the world after Disney, has invested and is taking the company global, this Irish tradition is about to become our most magical export since St Patrick's Day.
However, as is often the case, such an uplifting company found founded in a place of great difficulty and born out of an isolated moment of laughter between the friends around a kitchen table during a dark time in their lives.
Niamh spoke of how her husband's career, which was in finance, was rocked by the economic crash, saying "If there was a poster for the Celtic Tiger, we would have been on it and it all just stopped in 2008".
"He was in mortgages and literally, we went from over €100,000 to zero within months and we existed on money we had saved".
Luckily, Niamh and family had a fairy living in their house called Esme and her friend Aoife similarly had one in their household called Tilly who swooped in at exactly the right moment to save the day. Fairies are good like that.
While sitting around the table joking about what Esme and Tilly might be up to, the pair had a rare moment of joy and lightness. "Without sounding too dramatic, it was something that we just didn’t do at the time, we didn’t laugh, it was really, really, really hard times so to actually hear laughter, to forget about all the other stuff that we were worried about", she said.
To listen back to the full interview, and hear more about they turned sadness into magic, click the link above!
