Well? I hope you’re PROUD of yourself now.”

There it is, the ultimate ‘I told you so’, uttered by mammies the country over. Back in 2013, when Colm O’Regan first set up the Irish Mammies Twitter account and sent out this one-liner to the world, he couldn’t have predicted the huge reaction he would get in response. Even a wise Irish Mammy couldn’t have seen that freight train coming.

“It started as a parody account,” says Colm, laughing. “Those one-liners that are uttered in households throughout the country that people identified with. Things like:

“Would you like a bowl or wafer with that?

“Ye’ll have to fend for yourselves tonight, I’m afraid.

“I don’t care WHO started it. I’m FINISHING it.

“Suddenly, I was getting a much bigger reaction than anything I ever tweeted out from my own Twitter account. You see, over the years I have realised it’s not really about the funny phrases that a mammy says. It’s about the adult child’s reaction to them. You should have seen the response I got that first Christmas when people were back in the family home, probably with big heads on them from the night before catching up in the local, and mammy had them up at the crack of dawn to do jobs for the Christmas dinner. People were laughing at this Twitter account that reflects their reality.”

With that Twitter account, an idea was born, which led to three best-selling Irish Mammy books as well as Bolloxology-An Unreliable Guide to Ireland. All were musings on Irish life as we know it but now Colm has gone and gotten himself a very new fancy title. No longer is he just a writer, his own mammy can now proudly call him a novelist.

Not surprisingly, an Irish Mammy proudly takes centre stage in Ann Devine - Ready for Her Close-Up, but before Ann secured her own book, the character first came alive right here on the pages of Irish Country Living.

“The Irish Mammy account was gaining some traction when Mairead Lavery [previous Irish Country Living editor] first approached me to do a column. Over the course of a year or two, we ran 40 columns in Irish Country Living focused on Ann, and in that time Ann and the characters around her began to develop. As I say in the book, the column allowed me the time to build Kilsudgeon without planning permission or functioning broadband,” he laughs.

“So by the time my publishers said, ‘What’s the next book’, it felt time for Ann to take the leap from the pages of the paper and get her very own book.”

Not surprisingly, Colm’s first novel is laugh-out-loud funny as Ann navigates life leading the Tidy Towns committee, balancing life as a carer and managing a busy household, even if it does feel a little more empty now that her youngest son Rory has fled the nest. The novel brings in memorable and hilarious characters: Ann’s own mother Margaret, who is liable to say anything (especially related to her bowel movements), using her old age as an excuse for her directness; her daughter Deirdre, who with a young family of her own is fierce busy altogether; her niece Freya, a volcano of teenage hormones; and Patsy Duggan, the local councillor – the kind of fella who can be found in many a rural village.

Mostly though, it is giving a voice to Ann, that 60-something-year-old woman and the role she plays in families and towns across the country.

“The novel does touch on women’s confidence. The plot in the story where she leads the Tidy Towns committee, that wasn’t a case of her jumping up and down to do it. It was her daughter Deirdre who encouraged her to go for it. She herself didn’t think she was able for it. The Tidy Towns isn’t for the ‘likes of me’, and yet when she does go for it, she prospers.

“Similarly, there is a part in the book where she sees Deirdre being a strong, confident woman and she says to the affect of, “Look at her, she is a lioness. How was she reared by a tabby like me? I don’t know where she gets it from, it wasn’t from me, that’s for sure.” But really, Deirdre did prosper in an environment where she was given the space to grow, the confidence that there was someone supporting her who wouldn’t judge her when she failed.

“I didn’t set out to do a book on women’s confidence, it is much more subtle than that but Ann, like so many women of her generation, is a strong woman and that should be celebrated. I mean, these are the women who grew up in a very different Ireland but all have smartphones and are in WhatsApp groups. I guess I really wanted the book to celebrate the ordinary being extraordinary.”

There is also a theme of identity that again runs subtly through the book. “Now that her youngest son Rory has gone off to college in Cork, its about Ann re-evaluating her own identity. And I may not be a woman in my 60s but as a parent I get that. My daughter Ruby is only three and she is at playschool. You don’t know all the other parents by name. It’s ‘this person is such-and-such’s mammy’ or ‘so-and-so’s daddy’. It’s like a benign version of the Handmaid’s Tale. I am now ‘of Ruby’.

“I suppose you lose a little bit of your own identity and I can only imagine what that feels like in another 20 years’ time when Ann has raised a family of four. It’s about reclaiming her own identity as Ann Devine rather than being Rory’s mam.”

All of this is played out in the rural fictional village of Kilsudgeon.

“I’m not entirely sure where Kilsudgeon is, I guess if you did a 60km compass around Tullamore, it might be somewhere in that region of the country. I may be living in Dublin quite a few years now but I grew up in Dripsey in Co Cork and a lot of that influences my writing. It’s the people that make up a community and bring a fictional village alive and I get a lot of my clues from real-life interactions. So I wouldn’t say I eavesdrop on people doing their shopping in Lidl at the weekend, but at the same time I don’t not listen.”

Finally, we have to ask about Colm’s own mother, how much has she realistically influenced his writing? “Of course, when I started the Irish Mammies Twitter account, I used take direct quotes from her.

“Now though, over the years as Ann has become a character in her own right, I don’t think, ‘How would my mother react to a situation?’, it’s how would Ann act?

“My own mammy is just happy though that I am getting a bit of work. She is very non-judgemental and just wants her children to be happy. Have we got a mortgage? Can we pay it? Am I healthy? Are the girls healthy? She is incredibly easy to live with and isn’t overbearing, and that’s saying something because I’m the baby of the family.”