, host of , faced a harrowing experience in November 2019 when a fire wrecked her London flat.
Thankfully, Siobhan was not at home when the blaze occurred, but the incident left her struggling with lingering anxiety.
At the time the Cork-born star revealed firefighters had to break down her front door to access the property, finding the “whole flat in acrid smoke and my bedroom so hot it had cracked the windows”.
She said the fire chief identified the cause as a cube double adaptor that had partially dislodged from its socket, creating an ‘electrical arc’ that sparked the blaze.
Speaking to her 40,000 Twitter followers, Siobhan detailed the extent of the damage.
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Siobhan McSweeney was devastated when her flat in London went up in flames (Image: Getty)
She explained that the fire smouldered through her mattress, generating heat that melted fire alarms and the fuse box in a neighbouring hallway.
“The fire investigator assured me it wasn’t my fault,” she added, before sharing that she’d been urged to “get rid” of cube plugs.
The actress warned others: “Please please get rid of them. They are structured badly and it only takes a mm for there to be a spark.”
Four months later, Siobhan revealed she was still dealing with the emotional toll of the fire.
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The actress suffered from anxiety for months after the fire (Image: Getty)
Speaking to PA, she described living out of a suitcase and coping with an “aftermath of anxiety” that made it difficult to leave the house.
She said: “It takes me ages to leave the house, wherever I am. I have to go around plugging out everything and triple-checking everything.”
Her hypervigilance also disrupted the lives of friends who had taken her in.
“For a long time afterwards, I would wake up in the middle of the night and go round and unplug stuff. That was quite annoying for my friends, to be unplugging the television and resetting all their devices,” she admitted.
“Thankfully I have the best friends in the world who put up with my little neurosis.”
The Derry Girls star said the anxiety came in waves – but was accompanied by a profound sense of relief that the situation wasn’t worse.
She pointed out: “If I hadn’t been at that show, there’s no doubt, I have been told, that this would have been a very different story. It would have been the toxic fumes from the smouldering of the mattress… that would have got to me first.”
Since then, Siobhan has become a vocal advocate for the removal of cube plugs, urging people not to take chances.
“If people get rid of them, that will be a bonus to a dreadful thing that has happened,” she said.