Sharon Corr, part of the biggest Irish band since U2, has found happiness with her marriage to Gavin Bonner. She's come a long way from working in a Dundalk bar, ...

Sharon Corr, part of the biggest Irish band since U2, has found happiness with her marriage to Gavin Bonner. She's come a long way from working in a Dundalk bar, but it hasn't all been sunshine, she tells ELIZABETH BELL gave birth to 10 children. After Sharon Corr's grandmother had her first child, she tried "putting the sewing-machine up against the door" in Dundalk to avoid getting pregnant again. Clearly, the electric loom as contraceptive didn't work. There was something about her husband William, a Customs Officer from Lifford, that she couldn't resist, says Sharon: "It was his smell."

When Sharon first told her mother about this lovely barrister, she mentioned that Gavin Bonner smelled like her father. Jean Corr smiled as if she was reliving some beautiful moment. "That's what I love about your dad," she said, "the way he smells."

"That was what clinched it for my mum," remembers Sharon. "Chemical attraction . "

"I think my mother always thought smell was the most important thing," she continues. "It is fundamental. It completely attracts you or you are slightly indifferent to it or you absolutely hate it. With Gavin, it was like coming home that smell."

Was it something psychological vis-a-vis your father thatyou felt you could trust Gavinunconditionally?

"When Gavin came up to me, the first thing I thought was, 'God, I have never felt this comfortable before,"' she says. "I felt secure, protected, comfortable, independent. Looking in his eyes, I knew there was a really good guy there."

When did you decide that he was the one?

"Immediately."

Sharon says she can remember asking other people about this. How could you just know? When will you know?

In the end, "there was nothing specific. It is a comfort. It is a love, it is trust, it is a need to be with that person." She smiles.

She remembers back-packing around Italy with her barrister, the nights sitting in restaurants in Florence and Gavin impersonating the characters from The Fast Show and Sharon laughing so hard that the whole restaurant was "laughing with us".

The first Corr sibling to get married was at the Gaiety's late-night Brazilian shindig six summers ago when she glimpsed a nervous young man across the room nervous because he was thinking of a leading question with which to approach this dazzling vision of Dundalk womanhood.

Sharon had been shooting the video for Runaway, and, staying on with her American wardrobe stylist, had "drunk to every train going home and never took any of them". She had split up with somebody just five days before and, she says, "was just in one of those moods that I didn't need to go out with anybody again. I really wanted my independence."

Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, Gavin came up to the young musician, then virtually unknown, and said: "Could I ask you for some free advice? I was going to go and see if there was anywhere open afterwards is there anywhere else to go?"

"I knew he fancied me," says Sharon.

They chatted for hours "religion, music, family, what makes us tick, what we want in life" in the bar, then in the lobby, and then on a park bench in St Stephen's Green. As dawn rose on the park, Sharon told him she had no intention of going out with anybody.

Ms Corr went back to her accommodation (she was sharing a room in the Shelbourne with Andrea and Caroline £75 a night,with two of them sleeping on the floor) and Gavin to his. He got lost walking home. But Gavin didn't mind. He had arranged to see the girl at lunchtime outside the National Gallery.

"We went to see Jack B Yeats," remembers Sharon. "I always loved Men's Destiny."

Afterwards they repaired to Merrion Square and sat in the park all day, gazing into each other's eyes. It was two months later that Gavin came to Dundalk to see his new girlfriend. Seeing him walk up the driveway in his barrister duds that November evening, Sharon's mother Jean said: "I wouldn't mind him either."

As the kettle was boiled and the tea poured out, Gavin, Sharon and Jean talked about the very real things. Jean asked when they were going to get married. And Sharon was very comfortable with the question. "It all seemed very natural," she says now.

The obvious hurdle "the incredibly long stretches apart", due to Sharon's commitments to Ireland's biggest band since U2 was eventually negotiated but it was, she admits, difficult.

"When you get back after six weeks and you're home for only two days, you have to endeavour to start feeling comfortable again because you learn to be independent for six weeks. Nobody touches you, nobody invades your personal space, and then all of a sudden you are back with this person a couple of times it was almost too much, where we literally had to start the cogs running again.

"Separation leads to insecurity on both parts. I don't think we could have done it without Gavin's own confidence and his security in himself. It takes somebody quite extraordinary to go through this," she says.

On July 7 this year, Sharon and Gavin after six years of clocking up frequent-flier miles all over the world tied the knot. It was an intimate ceremony at St John's Church at Cratloe, Co Clare. "I'd love to do it again," beams Mrs Bonner. "It was very emotional. We had planned on enjoying every minute of it and it was incredible. In fact, we would have gotten married in six days instead of six years if it hadn't been for our careers."

Indeed, such haste was much evident during the rehearsal the day before the wedding when Gavin asked the priest: "When can I snog her?" He was told he would have to wait 24 hours.

And how did that first snog as a married woman feel, Sharon?

"It was an out-of-body experience," she laughs. "We didn't do tongues! It was a film kiss a prolonged kiss. Actually, Gavin's dad said: 'You did that for too long."'

Sharon felt calm for days before the wedding ("Andrea was on the verge of tears, and so was my best friend Caroline. My sister Caroline, who was the maid of honour, was more together"). But the violinist's studied composure was in smithereens by the morning of the wedding. As he drove with her to the church, Gerry Corr told his daughter that she reminded him of her mum on her wedding day. "It made me very emotional. I was crying walking up the aisle."

These were not the last tears shed that day. Sharon knew that no matter how well her big day went, it was never going to be the same without her late mother. In the aisle of the church, the beautiful bride turned around and saw Jean in the face of her brother.

"I saw her in Jim and how emotional he was," says Sharon. "I think that's how you have a sense of people who die you see them in people who are left behind. There was something about the look in his face that just looked like Mum."

Sharon Corr has dark nights of the soul just like the rest of us. This darkness is deepened by the sadness that her mother isn't here to share her life with her. At 57 years of age, Jean passed away on November 24, 1999. She was in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, being treated for fibro alveolitis a rare lung condition. Jean suffered a brain haemorrhage in the middle of the night.

When she went, Sharon summoned from the very depths of her being the will to face life without Jean. Her tears were shed quietly, but the darkness remains. When I asked if she had dreamt about her mother the night of her wedding, Sharon replies that she dreams about her mother all the time. The dreams "are not very nice", she says. "They're usually quite sick and quite weird dreams."

She has a recurring dream where Jean has a stroke and the family decides to keep her alive, although she's actually dead. "It's a warped, morbid dream," she observes. "Mum was very, very ill, and there was great hope, but then she got a stroke a totally different thing. She was technically dead you can keep somebody alive on a machine and that freaks me out. They're brain-dead it is quite freaky.

"Grief is very strange," she continues. "Two years later, it is still affecting me in different ways and you are constantly trying to keep up with recognising that it is grief.

"I meet people and they remind me of her," she says plaintively.

We are sitting in the penthouse suite of the Herbert Park Hotel. Outside the window we can see fluffy celestial clouds. But her thoughts are never far from her mother. She says she will be in a supermarket getting detergent when somebody will say: "I am sorry to hear about your mum." That night, a dream will appear.

"A lot of my dreams are missing her and wanting her to be around," she says. "Sometimes you feel you've been abandoned. That may sound selfish. But even though she died and went through the difficult process of dying, you say: 'I could really do with her."'

A year ago, Sharon was on holidays in the Caribbean when she walked into the hotel's spa treatment area. She saw a woman on the other side of the room and knew her mother was within her. Echoing Patrick Kavanagh's famous poem about his father ("Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death ."), she noticed that the woman's "every single mannerism was my mother's". Same body shape; same type of hair; the look in her eyes; the self-consciousness; the way she sat. Everything. Sharon ran out. "I was going to be crying in the middle of the spa with loads of people all around me. It was staggering," she says now. "She was a little bit older, but you knew she was very beautiful when she was younger. I felt she was an angel."

SHARON believes her mother is there in different ways. "Sometimes I have really nice dreams. I dreamt she was in the next room to me. I think she was singing My Irish Molly. That really comforted me." Jean used to sing that song to Sharon as a child.

Her earliest childhood memory is sneaking down the stairs, aged four, at one o'clock in the morning when her parents were having a party. Her parents, who played in a band themselves, were singing along to Celia by Simon and Garfunkel on the cassette player. Sharon stopped the tape and rewound it to the start, set it to play again and then ran back up the stairs again to bed.

Apart from their musical gifts, Jean and Gerry also gave their kids a belief in themselves. "They taught each of us independently that our own little personalities were great and our own thoughts and doubts and everything were great to trust our instincts."

Sharon, trusting her instincts, had a knack of infuriating certain nuns at school in Dundalk. One such bride of Christ told her she would be a failure all her life. (And Shazza, the polite multimillionaire, is not the kind of person to go: "Look at me now.") This perhaps had something to do with Sharon's very occasional absences from school. She bunked off once or twice. The future superstar didn't understand why she should have to turn up for school on a parent-teacher afternoon. "I did it because there was nothing on in school that day," she explains. "It wasn't being bold. Why should I have to sit and study?

"They didn't understand me," Sharon continues. "I did music when I should have been doing other classes. I didn't fit into the regular routine. Some people thought there was a negativity to me a side that didn't exist."

She believes her teacher's prediction was motivated by a lack of understanding of the young Corr. She says that she had a lot of confidence ("not arrogance") as a child, and that it was misread. Sharon thinks she made people uncomfortable because she did "different things. I left a music exam very early," she explains. "I was finished it was one of those things. Other subjects I couldn't have left early because I wasn't as good at them. Music came naturally to me. It came naturally to me to write harmony. I could hear it in my head as I was writing it so it took me half the time it took other people. That's the way it was ... "

There was a piano in the Corrs' home. From the age of five, Sharon would climb up on the stool and write silly little songs: a "C" chord and an "A" chord and a kiddie fairytale about golden ponds. The inspiration to create music was all around, since she was a baby.

"It was natural. Mum and Dad were rehearsing all the time together and we all had a natural gift and a natural love for music."

Music did things to her body, and her mind. "It was therapy," she recalls. "If I was in a bad mood I would go and bash the piano for a couple of hours and I would come out feeling great. I still do that today. It is fantastic therapy. Music describes feelings better than words it touches where words can never get to."

Even allowing for exaggeration, her music has brought Sharon to places she could scarely have dreamt of growing up in Dundalk. With 25 million albums sold worldwide, you might expect the Corr sisters to be a bunch of stuck-up cows. Gaelic Mariah Careys. Dundalk Whitneys. The anti-divas, they aren't even close.

Andrea pops her head around the door to offer congratulations on my upcoming wedding in Cratloe Church ("the same church as Sharon"). Sharon offers to make tea. She laughs at my Dorothy Parker joke about spraining her ankle sliding down a barrister. There is a bracing normality to these girls. They don't they parade their structural perfection as their mission statement to mankind.

Theirs is a story of great struggle and even greater success. Sharon doesn't easily forget the times when things weren't very good. How could she forget Christmas 1993, when their manager John Hughes (who, belief unwavering, had spent years trying to get them a record contract) helped them out with money for Christmas: this despite having four kids and a wife to support, plus a band that consisted of two schoolgirls (Andrea and Caroline), a girl who was working in a bar and managing a record shop (Sharon), and an older brother (Jim) who'd been in a number of different Irish groups which went belly up?

Sharon can remember the hard times when the future didn't look bright and stopping rather than going on seemed the easier option.

"I look back and I go, 'Thank God for naiveté,"' she smiles, "because if you knew beforehand how hard and how daunting it was as a career, you probably wouldn't have gone into it. You have to work so hard. The lovely thing about it is that you are naive enough not to know what it entails.

"I don't regret a thing about the last six years," she says. "It has been tremendous life experience seeing the world, so many different cultures, gaining great success, writing music and doing what we love playing all over the world. It has been pretty amazing.

"I do look back on days and say, 'Thank God that I am not there again' you know, you are very vulnerable when starting and not very confident learning a whole new skill. You are like a fish out of water very exposed and very, very vulnerable."

And now, happily married with the world at your feet, how do you feel, Sharon?

"Amazing. I've never felt this kind of absolute certainty before. We feel an immense knowledge of each other, an automaticunderstanding."

It's the sweet smell of success.

The Corrs' 'Best of' is available on Warner Music

- Barry Egan