Maggie Molloy: ‘A lot of the country still thinks I’m an estate agent’

By her own admission, Maggie Molloy is “not a ‘new house’ kind of girl”. She points to the collection of paintings of all shapes, sizes and styles hanging on the wall behind her. “That’s a very, very small portion of the random shite I collect,” she says, laughing. “No, it’s safe to say I’m definitely not a ‘new house’ kind of girl. Or a ‘new stuff’ kind of a girl either, actually.”
It’s a maxim that summarises the Wexford-born, Tipperary-based Molloy to a tee. In fact, the former graphic designer has carved a career out of rejecting the new and embracing the old. As the host of Cheap Irish Homes — the RTE series that has proved enormously popular with viewers and is about to launch its fifth season — Molloy unearths cheap properties and, with the help of the building engineer Kieran McCarthy, shows prospective buyers the potential in fixer-uppers.
The show’s roots lie in Molloy’s Cheap Irish Houses Instagram page, which she started in a bid to draw attention to the value in older houses, often in need of renovation.
“A lot of the country still thinks I’m an estate agent. A lot of people will come to me when they’re selling their house and ask me to sell it for them — it’s hilarious,” she says. “I’ve just always loved old houses; I think I’m probably overly sentimental and a bit of an old soul. People tend to just think I’m very passionate about the housing crisis — which I am, don’t get me wrong — but at the bones of it, it was just me being a bit heartbroken at seeing houses falling down in fields when we’d nowhere to live.”
In the past few years Molloy’s life has taken a 180-degree turn. Apart from the show, she now earns her bread and butter via her Cheap Irish Houses feed, which charges subscribers a small sum for weekly newsletters summarising the latest bargains on the Irish property market. She is a hit with television viewers thanks to her warm, down-to-earth, no-nonsense character, but there have been some downsides to fame too. She recounts one occasion where she was forced to abandon a shopping trip after being stopped by multiple people within the space of half an hour, all wanting to chat.
“People will just want me to go to their house for a cup of tea. That happened to me once; this man stopped me and said, ‘Oh, my wife loves you! See that lane, she’s down in the house. Go on down there to her now,’ and I’m going, ‘I’m going to be murdered. I’m definitely going to be murdered,’” she says, laughing. “And I’m too polite, so I’ll just end up talking to people for an hour, because it’s hard to say no when people are very kind and friendly. I’m not great at saying, ‘Oooh, I have to go!’ I’m a terrible liar.” She shakes her head, joking about going “full Kardashian” and hiring security. “Imagine!” she says. “No, we’re not quite there yet.”
Molloy grew up with a DIY attitude instilled in her partly through her father, who is a carpenter by trade and helped her with her own fixer-upper Tipperary farmhouse, which she bought for €80,000 when she was 23 and where she lives with her husband, Jamie, a plumber turned graphic designer (she also now has an apartment near her parents’ home in Wexford).
“It was a massive thing, because we would’ve worked with him when we were younger,” she says. “You weren’t going, ‘I’m moving into my farmhouse at 23 and I’ll make the stairs for myself’; it was more his attitude. He doesn’t look at anything as a problem. It’s always, ‘Well, surely it can’t be too difficult to do that.’ And we grew up in an old house, one of those little two-up, two-down Land League cottages in Wexford, so it was this tiny little house with all of us crammed in. And it was 200 years old, so there was always something needing to be fixed. Dad would fix our plumbing if anything went wrong, or he’d plaster something if it was needed. So it was that attitude that I grew up with — that sense of ‘Sure it’s not rocket science — it can’t be that difficult!’ I think that instils in you a very real attitude about the kind of houses that you can live in — because it was a basic house, but it was perfect.”
Surely there’s a dad and daughter property spin-off in the offing? Molloy shakes her head as she guffaws. “The two of us together is a dangerous combination, but I don’t think Ireland’s ready for Jimmy Molloy on the television. Ah, he’s class, but in the grand scheme of things, he’s a bit shy. He sees me doing this, and he’s more, ‘Are you gonna go into politics? Are you gonna make a difference? There’s still problems here, you can fix them. Sure you’ve a platform now, it can’t be that hard …’ That can-do attitude just keeps going and going. If he sees me in Áras an Uachtaráin now, he’ll be quite happy.”
Molloy makes a valid point. Becoming a TV star thanks to a property show in Ireland has placed her in the mix as an inadvertent spokesperson on the housing crisis. She admits that she has to be careful about what she says these days, “because if I say one word, I’ll literally have five calls the next morning from people wanting me to go up against three political pundits to argue my point”, she says with a grin. “And I’m not a great facts-and-figures person. I’m more, ‘It’s not right, I don’t agree with how it’s going, but I’m not saying I have a solution.’ And I think they want solutions. Everyone wants someone to come in and fix it, and I don’t think it’s that simple; I think there’s a lot of small things that have gone very, very wrong and have been going wrong for a long time.” She shrugs. “I don’t have the answer.”
For now, she will keep trying to make a difference on more of a micro scale. The forthcoming season of Cheap Irish Homes, she says, is much more of a “Maggie” season, as house hunters have become braver and more willing to take on a challenge as each season has progressed.
“The casting’s been great this year — it’s been a lot of people who’ve gone, ‘I want to take on a house and I don’t really want to do much to it at all; I want to embrace how people lived and enjoy these houses how they were meant to be lived in’, and I love that kind of stuff,” she says. “I know it sounds crazy to say, because you think everyone wants a cheaper house; but when a cheaper house means a large renovation project a lot of people will shy away from it. Whereas this year, you have people who go, ‘No, I want something in the back end of the northwest, and I want nothing done to it — I just want to do everything myself.’ I love that, because that’s how I approached my house when I was doing it in the beginning.”
The spin-off Cheap European Homes, meanwhile, sounds as if it would be a lot more fun to film than spending a soggy Monday in remote Co Kerry. “But it’s a hard slog, and it’s in the heat as well,” she says. “And you’re only getting into the swing of it when you’re back again. But the houses are phenomenal and the value is just crazy. I’ve rung my father while I’m in France, going, ‘C’mon, look at this! Will we go to France?’ and he’s like ‘Oh good God …’,” she says with a laugh. “He doesn’t have a passport so we’ll have to get him one — because he’s the one who’ll look at the roof and tell me if it’s OK. So I’m working on the passport for Daddy. Watch this space.”
Viewing properties on the Continent has only served to strengthen Molloy’s passion for preserving older homes in Ireland. “We’re literally losing a massive amount of our culture when all these old houses get knocked down,” she says. “When you’re in Spain, or Italy or Greece, you see this vernacular architecture that they’ve had for thousands of years continued on in how they build their houses now. They still live in their old houses and they don’t look at them as being obsolete. That’s where it started for me,” she reiterates, gesturing around her own beautiful home. “I didn’t like people just looking at them as if they were just crap in a field, because they’re not.” The new season of Cheap Irish Homes returns to RTE1 on Thursday at 7pm