User:Tim Molony/sandbox

Later Life and death
Giving her daughter up for adoption was obviously a key moment in Frankie’s life. Her niece Barbara says she never got over losing her only child and turned to the booze for solace. "She never got over that. She really turned to the drink in a big way. It was her last chance to have a child,  when she had her. She went through a very bad period of post-natal depression. She was prescribed valium and became addicted to it for 10 years. When she would drink she became very sentimental and maudlin and unhappy. There was nothing any of us could do for her. It wasn't unusual to wake up at 4am or 5am and hear these really sad Frank Sinatra songs and her sitting up with tears streaming down her face."She would have to pick herself up and brush herself down the next day and put a brave face on - and she always managed to do that."

However Frankie and her daughter were reunited a decade before her death, which was a source of great comfort for Valerie McLoughlin, who had spent a large chunk of her 20s tracking down her birth mother, oblivious to the fact that she was one of the most famous women in Ireland. “My mother – my real mother – was very supportive”, Frankie's daughter said. “She had some information that helped, but she didn’t give it to me until just before I was married, when I was 20, and I just kept that information that I had and tracked her down about seven years’ later.”

The first day they met was December 11, 1983, and within weeks Frankie threw a high-powered party for everyone to meet her daughter. Valerie was star struck by her mother's friends and bowled over by her bubbly mother. "She was a bowling-over type of a woman - hugely charming, great fun and had a brilliant sense of the ridiculous and sense of humour."

Frankie Byrne died at the age of 71 from Alzheimer's disease in St Vincent's hospital, Dublin, on December 13th 1993. Tributes were paid to her by colleagues and friends including the RTE assistant Director-General, Mr Bobby Gahan, who described the late Mrs Byrne's voice as "one of the greatest sounds of radio". Others who paid public tribute to her include fellow broadcasters Larry Gogan and Gay Byrne.