The night Aidan Comerford’s daughter Ailbhe was born in January 2006 was the happiest he had ever felt.
“I had everything I ever wanted and I was delighted,” he recalls.
Married to Martha, a woman he managed not to scare off with a declaration of love after just seven days of courtship, Comerford had fulfilled a lifelong ambition – he had a wife and now a family.
Working as a draughtsman in the construction trade, business was booming in the years before the bust and the couple happily had a second child, another girl, called Sophie.
However, by the time Sophie was a year old it became clear that something was not quite right with the girls and they were both diagnosed with autism.
Aidan and his wife took the news like many parents in their situation would.
“I don’t think I stopped crying from the Thursday to the Sunday. I think we took turns actually,” he tells Róisín Ingle on the latest episode of the Róisín Meets podcast.
With the financial crash came redundancy for Comerford as the construction sector collapsed. Mortgages payments were missed and it looked like they might lose the family home.
As the pressures of life mounted, Martha began to suffer from depression, but just as it seemed that his dream life was slipping through his fingers, Comerford found solace in comedy. Success beckoned with a prestigious win at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a trip to Montreal Just for Laughs.
In this podcast, Comerford speaks about making the decision to leave comedy behind, taking back his dream life to become the family man he had always wanted to be and about writing it all down in his book, Cornflakes For Dinner.
Published by Gill Books, Cornflakes For Dinner, by Aidan Comerford is out now.
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