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"The good die young," he muses. "My brother was the epitome of that. He never gave any trouble and was the antithesis of me as I was never out of it."
They say grief is that process by which our minds heal pain. They say that at the end of mourning, there is still sadness, but it is a wistful sadness that is tempered by the happy memories that we still possess for Jim Corr especially.
"I have memories of Gerard constantly bumping on a chair in time to whatever music the parents were playing," he says. "He was obviously very musical from a young age. It is highly likely that he would have, along with the rest of us, become a member of our band, The Corrs."
The Corrs' family house in Dundalk is full of memories. According to Jim, the "biggest mistake" his parents Jean and Gerry made was buying him a red walker as a baby. He would charge around the kitchen like an escaped lunatic which, to the next-door neighbours, he was.
"There was a couple of times when I went over the step that led out into the patio area with a foot drop and I wouldn't always land upright. I banged my head a couple of times. I used to go very fast," says Jim, "and my parents would be running out of the kitchen after me."
The same kitchen that Jim, his father and I are sitting in now. With his beard, Gerry looks like a more distinguished Lech Walensa, the leader of Solidarity in Poland. His voice is as clear and resonant as a silver trumpet.
"Jim suffered from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Syndrome or, more precisely, Jean and I suffered from it," Gerry laughs.
"Long before the condition was diagnosed. We got him this speed-walk apparatus to get him up of his belly."
Shortly afterwards, Jim Corr, one year old, became the Michael Schumacher of the speed-walker. Anything breakable, he headed for it at top speed delft, crystal, glass. One memorable afternoon saw nine pieces of Waterford Glass dispatched.
Accepting defeat, Gerry turned to the child's ashen-face mother: "Give him the last piece get it over with!"
Then, as now, Jim was incorrigible. One day Gerry was at the top of a double-extension ladder, painting an upstairs window, when a neighbour alerted him to the presence of his year-old son on a rung just below him. "I didn't panic," Gerry says. "I stretched down my hand and he gave me his hand, like that was what he was there for to give me a hand."
Jim'll fix it, indeed.
Jim can recall lying in the heat of the sun in a cot and his mother putting sun cream on him. "I remember the sensation of the sun on my face in the back garden. I felt secure. I felt love."
When Gerry Corr met Jean Bell at a dance in the Pavilion ballroom in Blackrock, Dundalk in 1962 he felt similar emotions. He wrote a poem about their first meeting, "Pavilion 62":
Booze bored
Winter woed
Bed beckoning
Did angels convene
To bring me to Jean
Of wraparound eyes
In passion of pink
First dance
Last dance
We dance for ever
"From the first time I met her, I loved her speaking voice," he says. "Later, when I heard her sing, my future was sealed! Happily, she liked me too."
What did she sing?
"It was an Irish song called Mo Shean Dun na Gall which she had learned at school in her native Donegal," he says. "Jean's is the voice of the Corrs."
Jean and Gerry were married on October 3, 1963 in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dundalk. (Almost exactly nine months later, their first son, James Steven Ignatius Corr, arrived on July 31, 1964.) Fatefully, a wedding present of a wonky old piano from Gerry's father James laid the foundations for The Corrs.
It was a quarter-tone flat due to the piano tuner's fear that upping the pitch would have added pressure on the old frame, and possibly broken it. A decision was made to put it in Jim's bedroom.
So as young as four, Jim would happily bash away on the piano to anything he had heard his father play on the record-player downstairs.
"Attempting to play along with a record recorded at concert pitch was interesting," laughs Jim. "Sounding like Les Dawson was no bother on this relic of an instrument."
Nonetheless, from that dodgy piano came an energy that fuelled the elation eventually unleashed in The Corrs. "Jim's talent and love of music came from both Jean and me," Gerry says, going off to put the kettle on.
The floors are wooden and polished-looking. There is a book by Deepak Chopra on the table. A framed tour poster of The Corrs is on the wall. In the background, Paul Durcan is on the radio. There is a picture of Jean on the mantelpiece; dark and beautiful, her famous daughters bear a startling resemblance to her.
It is hard to believe that the beautiful woman in the picture is no longer with us. In April, 1999, she was diagnosed with cryptogenicfibrosing alveolitis. Jim looked it up on the Internet.
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