Barbara Scully, a 64-year-old from Dublin, is now performing her one-woman show Because I’m Worth It around Ireland to capacity audiences of up to 200 people. This comes after she struggled to find work in her 50s following years as a stay-at-home parent.
“But once you get to 60, you realise that failure isn’t a big deal,” she says. “As long as nobody’s going to die, that’s grand.”
From rejection to a new mission
Scully had five previous careers: travel agent, word-processing tutor, fundraiser, stay-at-home parent, and author-broadcaster. She began her fifth career after a personal crisis when she couldn’t get a job despite a solid CV.
“I presume it was the fact that I was 50 and had a 10-year gap where my career used to live [while she was raising children],” she says. “The day I realised I couldn’t even get social welfare, I sat in the car on the driveway in tears, thinking: that’s it, I’m washed up, I’m done.”
She decided to make her own work, focusing on what she enjoyed: writing and talking. Over the next decade, she built a freelance portfolio, writing opinion pieces for newspapers and a book called Wise Up: Power, Wisdom and the Older Woman. She also appeared as a panellist on the chatshows Midday and Elaine on Virgin Media One and co-hosts an agony aunt slot on Seán Moncrieff’s show on Newstalk.
Finding laughter on stage
When her book was published in 2022, Scully was contacted by two women setting up an Irish chapter of Funny Women, a community of women in comedy. They asked her to help with a show, but she soon learned they wanted her to perform.
She rewrote a chapter on smear tests as a sketch. “I went on stage and after two or three minutes felt laughter coming back at me. It was like rocket fuel. It was something I’d never experienced before. It was huge. Really energising … I came off stage and I went: ‘Oh my God, I loved that.’”
In December 2024, a hotel approached her to do an event about her book, and she performed a one-woman show instead. She then toured it around modest venues with capacities of 70 to 100 people.
Embracing age and opportunity
Scully’s mission is to encourage women not to fear ageing. “I’m on a mission to try to tell women in particular not to fear getting older, to embrace it, to push back against all the bullshit about how you should be fighting ageing,” she says.
Growing up in a male-dominated house with her parents, three brothers, and sometimes a grandfather and uncle, she was 6ft (183cm) tall by 16. Her brothers nicknamed her “H”, for heifer. “I was never going to fit into society’s idea of how a girl should be – petite and not taking up space,” she says. “I learned to use my voice pretty early on.”
She now senses “a huge connection between who I am at 64 and who I was at 18 or 19. There’s that same feeling. The world’s my oyster. I can do whatever I want to do.”
