Author Claudia Carroll has lifted the lid on her experiences with online dating – comparing one bruising encounter to the Tinder Swindler.
The 53-year-old former Fair City star has just published her 18th novel The Love Algorithm and was able to draw inspiration from her own life.
She told how she went from dealing with love rat Paul Brennan in Carrigstown to real life charmers and chancers.
Claudia, who has sold half a million copies of her books and topped the Irish bestsellers list, told Irish Sunday Mirror: “The Love Algorithm is all about online dating, it’s all true stories.
“The first chapter opens with a girl who goes to this fancy restaurant with her online date and he lands her with the bill. This actually happened to a friend of mine.”
She added: “As a long-term single one you wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’d tell you. I met a fella who was a teacher from a very posh school.
“On the first date we met for coffee, so there would be lots of people around us in a public place. So your man tells me he’s divorced and his wife moved back to the US with their daughter.
“He was all chat about his daughter. He was hoping to get to the States to see her. The coffee was plonked in front of me and he said, ‘Claudia, I know we’ve just met, but flights to the US are a fortune, I have to get accommodation, I can’t stay with my ex.
“‘You wouldn’t lend me a few quid towards the flight?’ Then he suggested a figure of €100. He said, ‘I’ll give it back to you as soon as the schools reopen’.
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“I’ve friends for 30 years and I’d never ask them for money. I’d rather starve. So I stood up and said, ‘Lovely to meet you. I wish you the best with your trip’.
“I paid the bill and held my head high. It was only afterwards I thought I’m one of a dozen women he was meeting that day or possibly that month.
“How many of those other women would have been softer than me and said, ‘Oh go on there’s a few quid. Give it back to me when you have it’.
“It was an Irish version of the Tinder Swindler.”
Speaking of Tinder, Claudia has had plenty of close shaves swiping left and right. She revealed: “One fella I met told me he was Liam Neeson, having a break between movies. If you think that much of an eejit that I think Liam Neeson is on Tinder, as if.
“I had another fella on it claiming to be Tony Houlihan telling me his wife had just died.”
Despite not finding her happy ever after on the dating app Claudia admits it was great research for her latest novel.
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She said: “The scoundrels out there... it was great craic and research for my book, of course, there’s as many dating websites out there as there are people looking for love.
“When you’re in your 20s and 30s we want fireworks, romance and passion. By the time you get to my hour of life you just want companionship.
“It’s a best friend, it’s someone you can go out and have a laugh with. See a movie and yack about it afterwards.
“It sounds so boring, but it’s where I am in my life, you want a best friend who happens to be your boyfriend, not the other way around.”
Catfishing is something Claudia has also had first hand experience with – including one woman who posed as
a man.
She said: “If I were to be LGBTQ or a lesbian that would be fantastic as there are fantastic women out there.
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“But you were telling lies, you told me you were a fella. I copped her on the phone where she gave herself away. I mean catfishing goes on all the time.
“Why would someone do it? Like when the time comes for me to meet the fake Liam Neeson he was like, ‘I can’t, I’m on a film set’.
“To go on these in good faith you have to pick yourself off and dust yourself off.
“That’s what inspired the book, a heroine who’s been coding all her life she says I’ll come up with a great algorithm because the dates I’m being sent on are a load of s****, a load of horse manure.
“She thought she’d devise it herself as she certainly couldn’t do worse. If it became a Netflix series I’d be thrilled.”
Four of her books have been optioned for film and TV, but Claudia still returns to Carrigstown tough cookie Nicola Prendergast, the role she has played on Fair City for 20 years, every now and then to keep ex-hubby Paul in check. She said: “My name would mean nothing to people but when I meet them and they see my face, they think they know me socially, they say, ‘I know you from somewhere’.
“In real life the nicest thing the public can say if you meet them socially is, ‘You’re nothing like Nicola’.
“Because I always say Nicola is the type of person you want to be beside you in a crisis.
“She’s level-headed, clear, efficient and organised – but if she moved in next door to you, you’d sell your house and go.
“As an actor you always try to look at what made this person like this, she’s snobby but doesn’t know she is.
“She can be funny without knowing it as she has zero sense of humour. Paul Brennan played by the lovely Tony Tormey is and was the love of her life.
“Sadly her tragedy was she was never the love of his life, she was only ever a compromise.
“She would die for him and her son and that’s the good I try to see in playing the character.
“The way I see it with her is the production team fly Nicola in on her broomstick, let her stir the cauldron and let her fly back out again on her broomstick to Cork where Nicola is based now.
“Fair City is such a great team.”
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