Both my parents have a remarkable heritage — hard work, strong families and, in my mother's case, a bedrock love of Irish dance. My mother — a dance champion in her own right — was lucky enough to learn from her own mother, my grandmother.

My father was born and raised in an old thatched house on a small farm in Sligo, west Ireland. His mother was what they call “black Irish.” She was a beautiful woman with blue-black hair, tumbles of it — she must've had a spot of Spanish blood in her.