"I think there's so much I have got to be thankful to God for in that we weren't away. Weweren't on the other side of the world. We had such love and I have nothing to be regretful of. I have nothing to be guilty of. I loved her. She loved me. We were together. I spent so much time with her, and with Dad doing so much .…. so for that I'm thankful to God that I didn't have any extra stuff, and that I got to spend the last while with her. And that also she was spared further struggle. I'm not angry. I'm just upset, really. Not anger."

She knows she'll see her mum again one day. She'll open her eyes one morning and there Jean will be at the bottom of the valley, right before her eyes, hidden amid the golden trees … a deluge of glittering rays falling upon her, defining every angle of her face. And together they'll watch the sunlight flash along the distant grasslands. And round the corner is Eden.

"Some day we'll be together again and it will only be an instant until I see her again," she muses, "and she still is with me. I don't believe she's gone. I believe in another world and I believe it's just a different thing and it isn't physical and it's all goodness and love and happiness and warmth. Sometimes I have dreams that have indicated even further than my own belief: that that does exist."

She's with you now. Not just in dreams?

"I think she's with me now," she smiles. ™I think she's constantly with me. There are blessings bestowed on you and you don't know why but it is your loved one looking after you. And I feel that. I feel now, instead of when she was alive when I had her physically - when I could ring her up and be with her and smell her and touch her - but now she doesn't leave me for a second and I don't leave her for a second. I walk around with her with her arms around me. And even though life will upset you and things will happen, I have got that extra help. I would prefer her to be alive, obviously, but that's the way it is now."

You don't have to be a Zen Buddhist to understand that death is an inevitable part of life. People pass on. We lose people. The beautiful pop star now understands this more than most. As such, her words here contain the ring of honest mourning, of acceptance. She realises that you can't suppress something as powerful as the grief of losing a mother; and expect it not to have some kind of effect on you. So Andrea Corr has embraced Jean's death. In the final analysis, Jean Corr's death has given her famous daughter a better perspective on living.

"I thought life was wonderful before," she says, "now I think it's really wonderful. I know that sounds ironic. Most people say, `You should think it's crap now, surely?' But no. I just thought, `It's so beautiful.' We're all walking around so in need of each other and so lonely in our own bodies yet so joined of people that are here now. I have this broader picture and it's fuller."

"I always had a lust for life, and now I don't want to miss a thing." Andrea smiles. "I just want to feel it as much as I can and move on. I have no fear of death myself. I don't really want to go through what she went through but I think there's a reason that she had to

go through it and I surely couldn't cop out if she did it. I don't like that hospital scene … even though everybody's so lovely … but having things in and out when you're just going to die. It has to have been for some reason and I don't know that yet. I am a lot more frightened of losing other people."

Unencumbered by any form of cynicism, Andrea seems to live entirely on instinct - on feeling. She is almost immediately trusting and giving. She doesn't see the point - least of all now after her mother's gone - in wearing a mask, in putting up protective barriers against the world. Most of all, Andrea has that rare spark within her that Carl Jun defined in his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious as 'soul': "soul is a life-giving demon who plays his elfin game above and below existence."

"I don't care whether people think I'm spacey or whatever," she says, " or what they write about me. I just want to have truth in my life. I'm not scared of death. So why should I be scared of what anyone thinks of me?"

The Dundalk anti-diva has other reasons to be philosophical about human existence. Andrea Corr nearly died a few months after her birth. She was a very sick baby. She contracted a kidney infection and from there picked up gastronuntarightis. She was unable to keep any food down. "You vomit and vomit," she smiles. "They thought I was going to die. I nearly died. I was shifted around all the different hospitals. So for that reason I got an awful lot of love because I was brought back from the dead literally."

Because of the illness, she doesn't remember much about her very early childhood. She can remember her slightly older sister Caroline – "we were kind of brought up as twins - looking after her despite this new arrival usurping all her attention. "Mummy reckoned it was kind of harder on her because she was taken off the knee pretty quickly, but Caroline actually mothered me," says Andrea.

"I was baby and she looked after me. She had such a different personality. She used to cry when I did things wrong. If I was late for school, Caroline would cry, and I would laugh. Caroline cried all the time. So it would hurt her if I was messing up."

Twenty-four years ago now, Andrea can remember being brought to school for the first time by her mother. She can remember the moment Jean let go of her hand and she was without her mother for the first day of her life. "I was screaming crying and she had to leave me. I felt lost and then eventually becoming intrigued with the straws and the mawla and the different things to play with it."

Was the sense of loss that day when you were four - the sense of being utterly alone in the world - similar to the sense of loss you would have felt last November 25 when Jean died?