User:Clodagh okeeffe/sandbox

Family
Frankie was born into a well-off family of journalists from Dublin .She was mostly cared for by servants. From a very young age Byrne felt like she was a disappointment to the family and wasn’t loved as much as the other children in the family. Byrne was the middle child in the Byrne family. She had two Brothers and two sisters. Frankie attended boarding school in Rathfarnham. The eldest sister was named Olive, then came Michael, Byrne, her younger brother Brian and then Esther the baby girl. Byrne had no real relationship with her parents, her father was a racing journalist and broadcaster whom she rarely saw as he mostly lived in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell street where his job at Radio Éireann was located at the time. Frankie had become dependent on smoking and drinking alcohol, as it was running through her family. Olive and Mick her siblings died from alcoholism, and her younger brother Brian also had a drinking problem.

Personal Life
Byrne never married but had a controversial 30-year long affair with the legendary satirist who was a major columnist for the Evening Herald, Frank Hall. He was married to Aideen Kierney at the time. They had met as colleges in Raidió Teilifís Éireann and became very close. However their relationship has been disputed by family members and friends of Frank Hall, some saying it wasn’t true and that they never had a love child together. That it was a friendship not a relationship. A close friend of Hall named Sean O’Shea said he had “never been aware of an affair in all the years they had know each other.”

Byrne fell pregnant in the 50s when she was in her mid-thirties with Frank Hall, at the time being unmarried and pregnant in 1950’s Ireland was not approved of. She gave birth to her daughter Valerie on the 12th of July 1956. Byrne wanted to keep the baby but had to give her up to St Clare's Orphanage in Stamullen. She frequently visited her daughter in the orphanage for 6 months when she eventually signed for her daughter to be adopted. Frank Hall eventually left her, in her mid-50s. Byrne then endured severe post-natal depression, and she was prescribed Valium for post-natal depression and was addicted to it for 10 years. She also suffered from alcoholism, a condition that claimed the lives of two of her siblings.