Tomorrow the most prolific rural woman in the State celebrates her 40th birthday. She has spent most of that time shovelling manure, pulling on wellies, looking tortured and telling her husband to cop himself on. Fans of Glenroe say Biddy Byrne, tough, stubborn and intolerably tetchy, is part of who we are. If recent episodes of the long-running soap are anything to go by, her friends, who have organised a birthday party for her tomorrow night, will be hard pressed to make her smile.
Well, what could we expect? In the last few months she found out that her hapless husband had a drunken roll in the hay with her cousin and former friend Fidelma. In typical Biddy style she first made his life such a misery that he hightailed it to his Dad's house before she let him back to sleep on the sofa and recently back into the bedroom.
Despite being awarded bedroom access, the nation's favourite mullah needn't have thought he would be getting his conjugal rights. Ever the practically perfect dominatrix, Biddy has drawn up a list of boudoir rules, including one stating he cannot enter the room until she has changed into her nightclothes.
But the hypocrisy of Biddy, and the yawn factor for fans of Glenroe, is that we have been in an almost identical position twice before. Once Biddy enjoyed the attentions of a farmhand, Conor, and when she confessed all to Miley, he was utterly forgiving. When Miley briefly rekindled a spark with an old flame, the wounds took predictably longer to heal.
Fans of the programme prefer to call this "yet another beautiful contradiction in Biddy's character". In fact, some refer to her as "the type of woman who is not happy unless she has something to complain about", so maybe Miley did her a favour in a roundabout kind of way.
More than a million people watch Glenroe, which in recent years has been falling over itself to prove it too can depict "real life". For this read teen pregnancies, rape, drug abuse, yoof issues and in recent weeks murder.
While soaps like Eastenders, Brookside and the vastly improved Fair City tackle several such dramatic storylines at once, Glenroe seems to pride itself on dragging everything possible from a storyline with the result that it can often feel as though nothing new is happening at all in the Co Wicklow village.
Not much is known about Biddy's life prior to her mid-twenties when she was first unleashed on Irish audiences. Sixteen years ago when Glenroe began, she was a hardworking, studious young woman living on a farm with her mother Mary, her sister Carol and a father who was a great deal older than his wife.
The contrast between Biddy and her mother couldn't be more stark. Mary McDermot, as she was then, married a friend of her father at the age of 18. Rebelling against the restrictions of marriage and children, she has gone through life as an eternal teenager.
THE traditional mother/ daughter roles became blurred with Biddy taking on the responsibility of the family farm as Mary carried on an illicit affair with dashing local business man Dick Moran. The result is that Biddy has always been old beyond her years while her mother has never really matured.
When Miley and his father Dinny came over from the rubble of the excellent Bracken to live next door to the Byrnes, mousey Biddy did not catch his eye. He spent most of the first series chasing her sister Carol, all blond glamorous good looks, and then crying on Biddy's shoulder when she didn't return his advances. Eventually the penny dropped that Biddy, by this time mad about Miley, was the one to pursue but one source at the programme wondered "what the hell Biddy saw in Miley". Others say his generous good nature and his now tainted honesty were the qualities that won her heart.
The milestones in her life have been her marriage to Miley, the birth of her two children (the pre-babies script saw Miley checking with doctors to make sure he was doing it right) and her brief fling with Conor. In recent years she has become disillusioned with the church and no longer accompanies Miley and the children to Mass.
She is Glenroe's own unpaid Agony Aunt, a strong woman surrounded by weak people who is often cast as the peace-maker and problem-solver. She is also something of a busybody, and if there is any kind of scandal going on, Biddy will know about it.
She is a tough lady, according to one longtime fan of the series, well able to hold her own - "there are no soft spots in Biddy", she said, adding that she was "the lady of the house and God help anyone who steps on her toes". Another avid viewer called her "the first great liberated rural woman in the history of the State".
For fans, Glenroe is as much a part of our cultural identity as The Late Late Show. "It is a quintessential part of Irish family viewing, an inoffensive, sacrosanct time just before the news on a Sunday," sums up one regular viewer.
It conjures up images of freshly-washed children in pyjamas, school clothes laid out for the next day, allowed stay up to watch Glenroe. Some commentators pour cold water on this enchanting tableau by suggesting the storylines are not suitable for young audiences anymore.
Of all the characters in Glenroe, Biddy and the feckless Miley are perhaps the most recognisable: "She is tough, she is pretty and if you wanted someone to share your life, she is the one . . . she has been stuck in a dominant position all her life, first with her mother who was helpless at running a farm and then with Miley who is quite happy to have her making all the decisions," says Glenroe creator Wesley Burrowes
As well as juggling the open farm in Glenroe, her wayward husband, her children and a job in a bulb factory, she lives with her fusspot of a mother, now estranged from Dick Moran whom she married after her husband died.
As the surprise party unfolds tomorrow night, let's hope she finds some reason to be cheerful. Remember Biddy, life begins at 40.