Acting and music collide in Pullough musician's celebrity engagement!
When David Bracken was growing up in the quiet rural Offaly area of Pullough, his twin loves were music and acting.
Little did he know then that a collision of these two worlds would lead him on the path to true love with his recent engagement to former Eastenders star, Shona McGarty.
The happy news, which was revealed in an exclusive shoot with OK! Magazine, has led to wall-to-wall coverage for the celebrity couple across news channels and social media outlets over the past week.
The idea of being a celebrity is a tag that the self-taught guitarist and one half of hugely-popular musical duo, 'Blessed' wears lightly.
“I am just very lucky to have met Shona and I am very happy,” he told the Offaly Independent this week.
The son of Marie Tierney and Tommy Bracken, David has one younger sister, Sarah, and he says his new fiancée, who has Irish roots, has been in Pullough “loads of times and absolutely loves coming home to Ireland”.
Despite the fact that she had played the dynamic and demanding role of Whitney Dean on the hit BBC drama, Eastenders, for 16 years, David Bracken admits that he had “no clue” who Shona McGarty was they initially made contact through TikTok.
“She liked one of my music videos and then I messaged her to say I had seen her singing videos and would like to do a duet with her,” he recalls.
It would be another eight months before Shona McGarty finally messaged David back, and one of the most touching aspects of the relationship for her when they eventually got together was that David was completely unaware of what she did for a living.
“I thought she might have been a famous singer or something because she had a blue tick on TikTok,” he says.
The couple got engaged on their first anniversary and are now planning a Christmas wedding “over the next year or so,” according to David, who has now re-located to London, secured an agent, and is planning to try his hand at acting, having already enjoyed a successful music career for the past 16 years alongside his long-time friend, Tony Cunningham, in the band, 'Blessed.'
“We still have a number of engagements to fulfil so I will be over and back to play with the band for the next while, and after that I’ll be concentrating on getting my acting career off the ground,” he says.
David Bracken, who is a past-pupil of Killina secondary school in Rahan, actually started a band with his cousins when he was 14 years old, and was lucky to be taken on by Paddy Dunning of Grouse Lodge Studios as an apprentice after school, which led to him working in the Button Factory and Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin.
A gifted guitarist, he took only one guitar lesson in his life, when he was 12 years old, from Ciarán Rosney, and taught himself after that.
David Bracken and Shona McGarty are acutely aware that it is “very hard to meet people you can trust” in the twin worlds of music and acting, and David says both of them have had “past experience” in this regard.
“That is why we feel so lucky to have met,” he says.
While Shona has played the full gamut of emotions in her on-screen role as Whitney Dean, her fiance says “acting and real life are two different things,” but he expressed the hope that, in five years time they will be “happily married, successful in our careers, and be blessed with a family.”