It's really unsettling to be cornered by some wild-eyed, spittle-spraying weirdo telling you his crazy theory about supermarkets and what they do with the data from customer loyalty cards. But, in fairness, Jim Corr listened very politely to my rant about store cards, even after admitting he'd never given supermarket loyalty cards much thought.

"It's more geopolitics that I have got interested in," Jim pointed out, helpfully.

I dangled a tasty morsel about banks having all his financial details, but he replied innocently: "I'm with a very good bank."

Jim also came across as Mr Normal Dad in relation to Brandon, his two-year-old son with ex-girlfriend, Gayle Williamson. Brandon is going to be brought up Catholic.

"I certainly want to give my son a foundation and we got him christened recently," he said.

Before the interview, I had visions of a goggle-eyed Jim engaging in all-night Googling sessions in almost complete darkness, a miner's light strapped to his forehead.

"I love my sleep!" he chuckled, dispelling this disconcerting image.

When probed further about being Broadband Customer of the Decade, Jim insisted that he has to take a break from the stuff he's interested in. "You cannot allow it to totally overwhelm you," he said. "I try not to let it affect my life in a negative way."

He's not even bothered that the negative publicity might damage his musical success.

"I've got great friends but they understand where I'm coming from. And an awful lot of them have gone out to research this for themselves.

"If I didn't know that there were millions upon millions of other people across the planet who had been coming to the same conclusions, then I would have questioned whether I was right," he said.

He discounted the theory that conspiracies are ways for the human mind to make sense of traumatic events, such as Diana's death or the assassination of JFK.

"It's a very common psychology used to explain why people use their own ability to explain why they think critically about stuff. It's also common to say that many other truth-seekers on the planet -- who have been found out to have been absolutely right about what they have been saying -- that they're of unsound mind or that they've had a troubled background. I have not had a troubled background. I don't believe I'm of unsound mind."

He's still passionate about music -- happily listing the Keane song, She Has No Time, as his favourite song -- and he's hoping to put a band together soon.

Jim's favourite bands are Coldplay and Keane, which in certain muso quarters would be a greater crime than any of his other theories.

He's also a deeply humane guy, who's clearly still devastated about his beloved mother's death eight years ago.

"It's pretty bad. Anyone who goes through the loss of a parent knows what it's like. It's awful. You learn to accept it, you do over time. You get on with it."

He loves to talk about his dad, with whom he seems to have a very close relationship.

"We can talk about anything. We may not always agree, but he's a very bright, intelligent man. I've learned an awful lot from him.

"I think that the family were probably a little bit shocked that I stuck my neck out. But I felt compelled to stick my neck out." Jim's views in no way reflect those of his family, or the Corrs as a group.

"For his part, Dad just absolutely wants the best for all of us," Jim says. "He might not necessarily agree with my views, but I would always run things past Dad, always done that over my life," said Jim.

Despite the fact that Jim's warm personality was shining through as we spoke, my loyalty-card outburst didn't exactly come from out of the blue.

The build-up to the interview with Jim was enough to bring out anyone's inner conspiracy theorist.

After Jim agreed to meet up, he began sending me internet links to support his world-government theories.

Then the mails stopped, and two days before we were due to meet, I got a text from him saying he wouldn't do any more print interviews because he feared being misquoted. Jim is fairly adamant he has been misquoted in many recent newspaper articles.

We managed to reach an agreement that his direct quotes would be faithfully reproduced and that the interview would be recorded by both Jim and me.

On the day of the interview, I was told to drive as far as Dundalk only and await further instructions. Heading for Dundalk on the day, I received a message from Jim telling me to proceed to a local hotel. I eventually tracked him down, waiting in the dimly lit residents' lounge of the Ballymascanlon Hotel, sipping tea.

Jim asked that we keep our voices down when the waiter came in with some fresh tea and then gave him a generous tip.

I tried hard to remember all our prior agreements, so I put my box-fresh Dictaphone on the table next to his fancy recording device (I usually just write in shorthand). The two Dictaphones lying side by side provided an ideal opportunity to break the ice and engage in some silly male 'how big is yours?'-type chat. There was no competition really -- Jim informed me that his Dictaphone automatically types out the text of audio interviews. Show off!

It has been an extraordinary few months for Jim Corr. A couple of months ago, he was Jim Corr of world-renowned group the Corrs, the bloke with three beautiful sisters. Now, Jim has been transformed into the poster boy for Irish internet conspiracy theorists and he's a leading anti-Lisbon campaigner.

He doesn't like the term conspiracy theorist. Instead, he prefers to be known as a truth-seeker.

Up to three years ago, Jim wasn't that bothered about current affairs. He remembers being in London's Soho district on the day of 9/11, and the fact that it was his then girlfriend who rang him to tell him what had happened. At the time, he believed the official account that it was an al-Qaeda attack.

"I have been mostly sleepwalking around this planet for most of my life. I never really took an interest in politics, or global politics for that matter," he says.

Jim was never interested in going to college after finishing secondary school in Dundalk. He studied music, while also working in pubs, hotels and supermarkets.

It was only three years ago, when the band went off the road, that Jim first looked at clips on Google Videos about 9/11 and became interested -- very interested. He avidly watched documentaries such as Loose Change and 9/11 Mysteries and devoured books such as 9/11 Synthetic Terror.

As a result of his three-year investigation, he believes that a war on democracy has been launched. The Dundalk man believes, as he expounded on radio shows during the Lisbon campaign, that there's a secret

government behind many western democracies.

"I think that people should research for themselves and look at the reality that there's a whole secret government of the West, consisting of elements of the elite banking families and elements within European royalty and aristocracy, and it is widely believed now that the likes of Blair and Brown are puppets way down the chain of command.

"The biggest concern to me is this push towards global governance. This push towards a one-world government.

"The agenda is basically to merge the European Union with the Asian Pacific Union and the African Union and the North American Union," he said.

It's quite disconcerting to hear Jim come out with these theories with such certainty. It's disconcerting because he's a balanced and chilled-out guy on most levels. He's not troubled by conspiracy theories in other aspects of his life -- he isn't even perturbed by loyalty cards!

The first step in rationalising why Jim Corr believes these theories is to remember that Jim Corr is not like the rest of us. Jim has lived a surreal existence for a long time, which the rest of us can only dream about.

During our interview, he recalled concerts in Germany that were attended by 100,000 people, and also magnificent Irish gigs.

"There were momentous occasions. Lansdowne Road when we came back -- played to 50,000 people. That was a wonderful homecoming. Playing with the Rolling Stones. We did six gigs with them," he recalled.

There were dinners with Nelson Mandela and, perhaps most ironically of all, several appearances at the White House for both President Clinton and President Bush.

He also spoke of the madness of touring with three of his siblings for all those years: "It is difficult. We were lucky, we generally had a good relationship. We all certainly had our moments. What kept us together doing this was the love of music and the love of performing."

The years of touring and recording were very intense and then it all ended, three years ago. With more time on his hands, his truth-seeking began.

He dabbles in property development with a business partner, but he didn't seem that enthusiastic about it when he talked about this aspect of his life.

"There's not much happening in the market at the moment. I'm not hands-on. We buy to sell and buy to let," he said.

The various members of the band have also been busy with their own lives over the past three years.

"Unfortunately, we've all got different families so it's Christmas and birthdays that we're all together. We haven't seen much of each other in the past few years," said Jim.

It was clear that something else was needed to engage his attention once the band stopped playing.

"We were incredibly busy. I didn't have time for anything else. What got me interested was I watched a small clip on Google Video.

"I had time on my hands then. The thing is, most people are too distracted with their domestic and professional lives to study into this themselves, and it's completely understandable."

His eccentric views extend well beyond the world governance issues. At the drop of a hat, he can expound a theory on almost anything we talked about, ranging from religion and global warming to astrology and the energy crisis.

During our interview, we happened to talk in an unplanned way about religion and spirituality, which led Jim to put forward his theory on Christianity.

"I believe that we've been duped into worshipping the sun, if you look at the birth sequence and the death sequence in relation to Jesus Christ, you will discover that it totally relates to the sun.

"In fact, what I mean by that is on the 25th of December, in the belt of Orion, you have three stars and they line up with the brightest star in the sky, which is Osiris, which lines up with exactly the point where the sun rises on December 25.

"Those three stars in the belt of Orion are known to this day as the three kings. Three wise kings that follow the brightest star in the sky, to meet where Jesus is born. It's the sun. I believe that we've been duped into worshipping the sun," he says.

As I asked him about whether he critically analyses everything in his life now, he outlined his global-warming theory.

"I stand back now and I look at everything. I believe that the anthropological global warming is a scam; I believe that man-made warming is a scam.

"The earth is actually in a cooling phase. The reason I doubt this is because scientists were able to determine that, in fact, the entire solar system at one point was heating up. And, indeed, the ice caps on Mars were receding.

"And SUVs on planet earth couldn't possibly be doing that, so what is? It must be the sun. The sun is going through a cyclical period of intense luminosity and indeed scientists were able to prove that by taking ice-core samples from the South and North Pole, and they have been able to establish that, indeed, it's cyclical. It's periodic, it happens."

He believes that climate change is now being used as another method of control of the citizenry and is a revenue-raising ruse.

Google Video has also made him suspicious of the current oil shortage.

"Forgive me if I sound like I see scams everywhere -- I don't -- but certainly in those issues I do, and also in the whole peak oil scam.

"I believe peak oil is a scam designed to create artificial scarcity. Go and watch Google Video, the documentary The Energy Non Crisis," he said.

Jim Corr was also disenchanted with the mainstream media and he's had his share of paparazzi problems.

"When you come out of somewhere and suddenly there's a camera in your face; I'm not the type of person who's comfortable in the spotlight, but it's part of the job," Jim said.

So, Jim Corr was privately filling the void with his Google-based investigations: then the Lisbon Treaty came along, at which point, two worlds collided and Jim became a public figure with his seemingly eccentric views. When Jim appeared on Today FM arguing against the Lisbon Treaty, believing it to be "covert colonisation", he was immediately compared with eccentrics such as David Icke.

Then something odd happened. A fair proportion of the radio listenership was young and disaffected. They were also computer literate and immediately knew about Jim's theories on false flags, neo-cons and neo-camouflage imperialism. They had never heard a public figure endorsing their counter-cultural theories before and many said they supported him, or at least loved the fact someone was espousing them.

Jim's oddly naive view of Ireland also charmed people, particularly when contrasted with Brian Cowen's barracking of the electorate.

"I love this country, I love living here, I love the Irish people. I think that, particularly when the sun is shining, this is the most beautiful country on the planet. And we have got pretty much everything here. We've fantastic fishing, we've got fantastic agriculture," he told me.

Jim's passionate and sincere explanation of his beliefs won people over and his 'No' stance became one of the thousand cuts that killed the Government's pro-Lisbon campaign.

For Jim, it's debatable whether he was in the right place at the right time or in the wrong place at the right time.

When the Corrs stopped performing, he found something to fill the void -- and he applied the same intensity to that as he had to making the band such a success.

As we finished up our chat in the Ballymascanlon Hotel residents' bar, Jim explained just how driven an individual he is and what techniques he uses to achieve success.

"I used to do this thing called creative visualisation, and this might be out there for some people, but for a lot, it won't."

"I got into meditation years ago. You basically get yourself into a deep state of relaxation and then you creatively visualise what it is you want. Now, you got to do an awful lot of work with it at the same time. But I think it played its part in possibly helping me and us [The Corrs].

"You're trying to reinforce a goal in your subconscious that will feed thought into your conscious. We were right at the point of giving up and then suddenly . . !

"If there's a lesson in that, it's perseverance and overcoming these hurdles that are inevitably going to come your way," Jim says.

Applying the same intensity to his truth-seeking, he found himself compelled to go public with what he had learned.

"I found myself studying that for three years, and what do I do with that knowledge? I have done something. I've stuck my neck out and I've taken the flak for it and people can make up their own minds about the information that I'm presenting."

With the Lisbon experience behind him, perhaps his biggest challenge now is to creatively visualise his life -- without truth-seeking.