Tracing Billie Eilish’s Irish roots back to West Cork

Ahead of Billie Eilish’s highly anticipated Dublin concerts, we explore her West Cork roots, where two of the singer’s great-grandparents were born.

Billie Eilish returns to Dublin this weekend for two sold-out shows at the 3Arena, but her visit to Ireland also brings renewed attention to her Irish roots. Though born and raised in Los Angeles, the global pop icon has direct family ties to West Cork, where her O’Connell ancestors lived before emigrating to the United States in the early 20th century.

The Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer, whose full name is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, has often spoken of her Irish heritage, although the exact nature of her family connection to Ireland was not widely known until recent years. That changed when Ian O’Brien, based in Surrey, England, traced her paternal family line to the Dunmanway area of Co. Cork. A third cousin of Billie’s father, Ian stumbled upon the connection by chance while researching his own family history. He believes he was the first to trace the star’s Cork roots.

Billie Eilish’s links to Lisbealad

Ian’s findings were published in the Southern Star in 2022, in an article by Cork journalist Kieran O’Mahony – a second cousin to Ian and a fourth cousin to Billie Eilish. The research showed that the singer-songwriter’s great-grandfather, William H. O’Connell, came from the Clubhouse Bar in Lisbealad (East), about 5km south of Dunmanway.

During the course of our own research, we found a birth record for a William Connell, born in Lisbealad on 17 June 1877 to William Connell, a farmer and Margaret Connell (née Holland) – potentially the great-great-grandparents of Billie Eilish. This couple had married four years earlier, in 1873, in the Roman Catholic chapel in Drinagh – William was a widower at the time, his first wife Ellen Butler having died the previous year.

The marriage record indicates that his father was also named William and Margaret’s father was Jeremiah Holland, both farmers – these are potentially two of Billie’s great-great-great-grandfathers. Margaret died in 1891, leaving William a widower for the second time. In the 1901 census, he is listed as a farmer and publican living in the pub in Lisbealad, which was classified as a 1st-class house, along with several of his children: Mary (born 1876), Patrick (born 1878), Denis (born 1883), Hanora (born 1884) and Ann (born 1888).

William had at least 15 children across his two marriages (14 with Margaret) – so there could be plenty of Billie’s cousins still living in West Cork and beyond. As well as the children listed as living with him in the 1901 census, and his aforementioned son William, he also had children named John (born 1869), Margaret (born 1873), Kate (born February 1875 and died less than three months later), Ellen (born 1879), Hannah (born 1880), Daniel (born May 1882 and died at five months old in October 1882), Julia (born 1885), Eliza (born March 1887 and died the following year in August) and James (born January 1890 and died the following year in July). Their father William died in 1914.

In 1907, his daughter Mary married Michael Cotter, who became the publican of the Clubhouse Bar. The pub is still standing today and is owned and run by the Cotters. The crossroads where it is located is known as the Clubhouse Crossroads – as marked on all historic Ordnance Survey maps, with the Clubhouse Mill and Clubhouse Bridge nearby.

Emigration

Returning to Billie’s great-grandfather William H. O’Connell, he married Catherine T. O’Connell, Billie’s great-grandmother, from the neighbouring townland of Edencurra, after both had emigrated to Boston around the turn of the 20th century.

Their son James (“Jim”) B. O’Connell – Billie’s grandfather – was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1923, the eighth of nine children. A Harvard graduate, he served in the US Army Signal Corps in China, edited several magazines and was an executive at IBM. He was also a singer. He was married twice: first to Jean S. O’Connell, who passed away in 1975 and then to Beatrix W. O’Connell. Jim died in 2014. His son, actor Patrick M. O’Connell, is Billie’s father. Billie’s mother is actress and singer-songwriter Maggie Baird, who is of Scottish descent.

>>> YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Oasis brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher’s Irish heritage traced through Meath and Mayo

In 2022, Kieran O’Mahony and Ian O’Brien contacted Billie and her brother Finneas on social media to share the family connections, and also reached out to their father, Patrick, through Ancestry.

Billie’s Irish heritage is detectable not just in her surname but also in her middle name Eilish – an Irish form of Elizabeth. In a 2018 interview with Hot Press, the pop sensation said she was fed up with Americans mispronouncing her name as “Eye-lash”.

Raised in California, Billie has shown a strong affinity with Ireland. On her first visit in 2019, she told Today FM that she had grown up hearing about her Irish and Scottish heritage. During her performance at Electric Picnic that year, she famously told the crowd, “I’m part Irish, dude…this is my home”.

A F F I L I A T E  A D

When Billie Eilish takes to the 3Arena stage this weekend (26 and 27 July), be sure to give her a warm Irish welcome and celebrate those Rebel County roots.

Advertising Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. Irish Heritage News is an affiliate of FindMyPast. We may earn commissions from qualifying purchases.

READ NOW

➤ Taylor Swift’s Irish roots traced in new research

➤ Tracing John F. Kennedy’s Irish ancestry through Wexford, Limerick, Cork and Fermanagh

➤ A genealogist’s guide to DNA testing for Irish family history research

➤ Irish connections with the doomed “Millionaires’ Ship”, the RMS Republic

➤ Two seasons of Sloinne, TG4’s Irish surname series, now available to watch online