Maggie Molloy: ‘There’s no point being humble. The show brought attention to forgotten houses’

Maggie Molloy is mad about traditional Irish wooden dressers. She rescues dressers the way some people rescue dogs.

“People are getting rid of them at an alarming rate and it’s scary,” says the founder of Instagram sensation Cheap Irish Houses and presenter of the television series of (nearly) the same name, RTÉ One′s Cheap Irish Homes.

Molloy will soon be back on our screens presenting the fourth series of Cheap Irish Homes in which she helps people get on the property ladder by showing them affordable, often unloved or remote, houses around Ireland they might not have otherwise considered. Think Channel 4′s Location, Location, Location only on a much tighter budget.

But back to those dressers. She got a call very late one night from a friend who said he was cleaning out a house. The owner had an antique Irish dresser in the yard and an axe in his hand. Her friend said: “I took the axe off him but how soon can you get here?” Molloy and her husband got into the jeep that night and brought the dresser home.

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In addition to saving dressers, Molloy is the kind of person who gets a kick out finding a JFK or pope picture on a dilapidated farmhouse wall, and delights in those little red bulbs found under Sacred Heart pictures. “They are usually still wired. I’m not religious but I love this stuff. I sometimes think people must look at my Instagram and think I’m a Holy Joe.”

Molloy’s Instagram account is a place people get lost in. You go there to marvel at a vernacular cottage by the sea in Easkey, Co Sligo for €55,000 and before you know it you are down a rabbit hole emotionally invested in the surprisingly intact interior of a tiny house in Tullyowen, Co Donegal for €25,000.

She always loved old houses, having grown up in rural north Wexford in a home that was more than 150 years old. Her dad, a carpenter, was always “doing bits” to the family’s two up, two down council house. “We had a massive, wild back garden, four siblings who all got on very well, a very idyllic childhood. We didn’t have a lot but we had everything,” Molloy says.

She’s talking from a small flat she has in Wexford which she bought after the pandemic, so she could own a place near her parents. She bought her main home, a farmhouse in Tipperary, for €80,000 when she was 23 in the early 2000s, a time when she struggled to find something she could afford in or around her home county. It’s why Cheap Irish Houses became such a passion project. She’s a homebird. “I would have stayed in Wexford my whole life if I could have… it’s really sh*tty that young people have to leave their home place [because of the housing crisis]. I didn’t want to.”

The origin story of Cheap Irish Houses is typical of the organic and instinctive way Molloy’s career has unfolded. Keen on art as a student, she was first set on becoming an art teacher, but pivoted into graphic design. After working for other people for years she became self-employed, selling her illustrations online. When her plumber husband Jamie was laid off in the recession, she “retrained him” in graphic design and illustration. Now they work together. (Molloy relays this information about her plumber-turned-artist partner as though it’s a perfectly natural development.)

Cheap Irish Houses was inspired by drives up to Wexford from Tipperary to visit her parents. She’d see derelict houses and think about taking a photo, but the next time she passed “the house would just be gone or else replaced by a bungalow”. Molloy decided she wanted to document this vanishing Ireland, and began photographing the forgotten homes. She never went inside any of the houses – “I was too much of a goody two shoes to sneak in” – but she was always curious about the interiors. One night in her own kitchen in Tipperary, she wondered whether estate agents might have pictures she could use. She found a house advertised for sale online for €30,000, and had the light bulb moment that led to Cheap Irish Houses.

Molloy put up the first house on her new account in December 2018, telling nobody about it. Within two weeks she knew she was on to something when visiting her parents in Wexford. “My mam said, ‘Oh my god, you have to see this account on Instagram. You’re going to love it, these houses are all wrecks. Me and daddy have been looking at this all week’.” When Molloy smiled in response her mother said “Is that you?”. “I said ‘Maybe’,” Molloy recalls.

The account ticked along steadily until August 2019 when an Irish model was on a free trip to a hotel in Dingle and stumbled upon the account. The influencer was so thrilled by what she saw and shared it so widely the account went viral. “My phone died during the night and that morning I woke up to 8,000 followers. That was the day I turned off notifications on Instagram and I haven’t turned them back on since,” Molloy says.

The account quickly became so popular Molloy was invited to do radio interviews, including one on RTÉ Radio 1′s Saturday morning show The Business. She brought her mother up to Dublin for the occasion.

“My mam asked ‘Can I come?’ and I thought, well none of us are ever going to be in an RTÉ studio ever again so yes you can come.” On the way home in the car Molloy got an email from a television producer who thought the concept would make an excellent television show. He wanted to know if she was interested. Molloy couldn’t believe it. By the end of the weekend she had three such offers from production companies.

In the end she went with the person who sent that first email, AV3 Media/Cameo Productions in Cork. Her only caveat was, “If I’m terrible at it you have to let me walk away”. It turned out she was a natural TV presenter. She was adamant that the television programme would be genuinely helpful and true to the spirit of Cheap Irish Houses.

“It’s not a job to me, it’s sentimental and still something very raw, something that needs to be fixed and we haven’t fixed it,” Molloy says of the housing crisis. The main difference with the television programme is that the homes are often a bit more expensive than the ones on the Instagram account, which are all under €100,000. “I’m strict about that, but for a television programme it needed to sometimes be higher than 100k or we’d never have been able to make four series,” Molloy explains.

When she first started filming, the account had a healthy 57,000 followers. That number has nearly tripled to 159,000. The real bread and butter for Molloy is the €5 a month subscribers pay for a newsletter which contains a much bigger digest of cheap houses. She won’t say how many subscribers there are: “We never tell a soul,” she laughs. “But it’s a great earner.”

Molloy does not enjoy tackling queries about the housing crisis. “I get asked a lot about it but there are people much more qualified than me,” she says. On the show, her co-presenter, building engineer Kieran McCarthy, tends to tackle the “facts and figures”. On the day we speak, a Eurostat study revealed 68 per cent of 25-29-year-olds in Ireland are living at home in their childhood bedrooms. Molloy has so many friends and peers that are affected by the housing crisis. She wishes this “silent majority” were more visible.

“I’m no housing crisis crusader. I don’t have a solution … but I would love if every single person who has an issue with this were counted. Adding yourself to the housing list would be a symbolic way of showing that. Can you imagine if there were queues of young people down the streets outside council offices?”

In the new season of Cheap Irish Homes, she explores the new Vacant Property Refurbishment and Derelict Property Grant schemes available to assist budget-conscious buyers. Does she feel her Instagram account and TV show has made a difference?

“There’s no point in being humble. The show definitely brought attention to these forgotten houses on a national scale, and encouraged young people who were open to living in them to say that out loud.” When Molloy bought her own home in Tipperary, which needed a lot of work, she got comments from older generations such as: “Ah you couldn’t live there” or “That will fall down around you.”

Molloy says people who show interest in these kinds of properties can get beaten down by the comments. “The show gave young people a bit of confidence to say ‘Well I’m not the only person who thinks these houses have potential’.” Is it gratifying to have been part of that shift? She sometimes gets messages from people who have bought houses because of her, or decided to change the path they were on.

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“That means a lot,” Molloy says. “I remember telling someone that if I was responsible for one person getting into a house it would mean so much, and they said ‘but that’s only one person’. But if everyone could do that for one person we’d be grand. When it was one person it felt brilliant, it’s a massive thing to think you could walk away in 20 or 30 years time and think, ‘I did that’.”

Coming as she does from rural Ireland, it also gives her a sense of pride and excitement to be part of something that brings people back to more remote places. “There seems to be a new enthusiasm for rural Ireland as a whole and that’s the thing I am probably proudest of,” Molloy says.

A recent spin-off from the Ireland-based TV show was Cheap European Homes, where Molloy went looking for reasonably priced properties abroad. The accidental influencer and television star has lots of other ideas and plans. The lease has just been signed on her new office in Wexford, from where she and her husband also plan to open a vintage store, a once a month pop-up shop, selling items they’ve salvaged from old houses, much of which would otherwise end up in landfill. That shop will likely become a must-visit destination for fellow fans of old Irish dressers, rustic farmhouse bread bins and even those Sacred Heart pictures. She’s also now in a position where she needs to hire staff. “Is that mad?” she laughs. Not at all. It feels like just another natural step in the interesting life and times of marvellous Maggie Molloy.