Rosie O’Donnell feels like she has “come home” after moving to Ireland.
Rosie O’Donnell found moving to Ireland felt like “coming home”.
The 62-year-old comedienne revealed last month that she and her youngest child Clay, 12, had left the US earlier this way after Donald Trump was re-elected as president and she has settled in much more easily than she had expected.
She told the New York Times newspaper: “I see reflections of myself in this country everywhere I look, and reflections of my family and my very Irish childhood.
“We’re 100 percent Irish. Being Irish Catholic was a very big part of my identity, and coming back here does feel like coming home in a way that’s hard to explain or understand, even for me.”
And Rosie has found people to be unusually friendly, so when they approach her in public, they do so in a way that seems “1,000 percent different than in the United States.”
The ‘A League of Their Own’ actress admitted Trump’s first presidency took a huge toll on her.
She said: “World tragic events have always wiped me out emotionally. I believe it stemmed from watching the Vietnam War on television as a little kid during dinner and seeing unbearably graphic horror on the news.
“I was unbelievably heavy, I was drinking too much. But there were guardrails.”
And so when it seemed increasingly likely the former ‘Apprentice’ star would be elected for a second term, she began making plans to move.
She said: “I never thought he would win again. But I said, ‘If he does, I’m going to move,’ and my therapist said, ‘Well, let’s make a real plan.’…
“I got my passport renewed, I got Clay’s passport renewed. My brother has his passport. All my cousins have their passports. But I was never a traveller.”
Rosie previously claimed Trump had had “it out for her” for 20 years.
Appearing on Ireland’s ‘Late Late Show’, she said: “[Trump] has it out for me and has for 20 years, when I told the truth about him on a program called ‘The View’.
“I mentioned his bankruptcies and I mentioned all of the sexual assault charges and I mentioned that he was not, in fact, the businessman that everyone thinks he is because of the show, ‘The Apprentice’, where they sold a bunch of lies to America for over 10 years and half of America believed it.
“And so he was very angry to say the least, and he hasn’t let it go. And he sort of uses me as a punchline whenever he feels the need.”
Despite their long-running feud, Rosie – who is also the adoptive mother of Parker, 29, Chelsea, 27, Blake, 25, and 22-year-old Vivienne – admitted she is still “not used to” Trump calling her out publicly.
She said: “He’s been doing it for two decades and I’m still not used to it every time he does.”
Rose O’Donnell: Ireland feels like ‘coming home’
