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"I got quite a shock when I realised it was a fatal and incurable disease," he says. "But were always holding out, you know? You just hope."
In November, Jean was flown to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle for a lung transplant when her condition suddenly deteriorated.
"Dad told us that it was near the end," Jim remembers sadly. "We were working in the studio in Dublin. We flew over straight away to Newcastle and we were with Mum when she died."
On November 24 1999, Jean on full ventilation at that stage passed away in the middle of the night. "I've accepted that the death of my mother has happened," he says, "but I'm not sure that I've fully come to terms with it. One can put it to the back of one's mind but it still surfaces when you least expect it.
"I'm sure other people whohave gone through the death of someone close will identify with an increased sensitivity to anything of an emotional nature. I embarrassingly find myself crying during sad moments in films, for instance, which I've never done before. Acceptance of her death would be impossible but for my faith in a life beyond this one."
Jim enjoyed a close relationship with his mother. She would have done anything for him, her first-born. The emotions rise up in him as he reveals his memories. The words spill out. Jean was, he says, "loving, supportive, optimistic, glamorous, practical, determined, honest to a fault and justice-seeking. It might sound like a son attempting to paint a pretty rosy picture of his deceased mum," he continues, "but it's true that while she had her faults, she was all of these things.
"She would never let anyone away with having wronged her in any way and I ended up the deserving recipient of her wrath on a number of occasions due to my adolescent antics." (These included lifting his youngest sister Andrea, then four, onto the very top shelf of a big cupboard during games of hide-and-seek. Poor Andrea would be sitting up there waiting for someone to come and find her, but the game would have stopped "hours ago".)
Children lifted their heads en masse from their books when past pupil Jim Corr drove in through the gates of Colaiste Ris earlier the day we met. His own time there was unmarked by academic achievement. Indifference, coupled with a penchant for going AWOL, might have had something to do with it. He would write his own notes to teachers, explaining that he was sick on such and such a day.
"I think every time I did it I got caught. I used to say I was at the dentist," he laughs as we sit in the car-park of the school. "The teachers must have thought I had the best teeth in Ireland because I was always at the dentist," he smiles. He wasn't. He was either hiding in his grandmother's, in town, or walking along the railway line. We take a drive past the old railway line on the other side of town where young Corr would occasionally spend the afternoons he should have been at school.
"Unfortunately, I was bored with school in general," he says. "I was interested in science. I was shit at maths and history. I loved music. I could focus on music," he says.
According to his father, teachers described Jim variously as "on springs", "disruptive" and "out-of-control". "Which was very educational for Jean and me," he smiles ruefully.
A deeply religious man ("My faith is the faith of my father and my mother"), Gerry sees humankind as "a fractured unity. I believe that this unity will be restored one day through the realisation of the One God within all of us."
It was precisely this belief in a divinity present in all human beings that made Gerry speak out in support of a centre for travellers in Dundalk in the late Sixties. It wasn't a stance that made him popular. He was called "The Weirdy Beardy" in a local newspaper.
"The concept was an Habilitation Centre to help travellers transfer from a life in the ditch to a house in the settled community. Sadly, the Nimby factor triggered in, like elsewhere in Ireland," he says now, stressing that what he did in 1968 was no big deal.
I ask him whether Jean was attracted to his idealism.
"I think my idealism, if that's the word, was a pain in the neck to Jean," Gerry says. "Jean was a pragmatist. She loved the earth, loved life, loved people loved me."
To Jim, the traveller story illustrates how his father couldn't help but "try to stand up for a wronged and victimised minority".
Earlier Jim had driven me round his hometown in his brand-new Euro100,000 Lexus. Past the hedge-lined street where you'd go "for a wee court". Past the pub where, 10 years ago , he and Sharon Corr played traditional music for £60 each a night. And past a seemingly endless array of places to get your hair done.
"At one time there were more hairdressing salons in Dundalk's than there were pubs. Don't ask me! Ask the hairdressers!" laughs the immaculately coiffured Irish popstar behind the wheel.
We stop at McManus's pub for coffee. Sharon, Caroline and Andrea used to work behind the bar here. (Lillian McElarney, their auntie and Jean Corr's sister, owns the pub with her husband Brendan.) Up on the wall are pictures of the girls with various uncles. Auntie Lillie won't hear of taking money from me for the refreshments.
Up the road, the Adelphi Cinema stirs up Jim's teenage memories of bringing girlfriends to Bruce Lee movies ("I was big into kung fu, for some reason"). We pass the church where his parents married almost 40 years ago. "They were both devoted to each other and then to their children as we arrived," he says, "and they both shared a deep love of music, which they passed on to each one of us. And growing up in a musical family certainly encouraged us to get into music," he says.
Within walking distance of the family home is a small gate lodge on the grounds of a big estate on Mount Avenue which Jim rented for £40 a week when The Corrs tentatively began their assault on the world 10 years ago.
At that time, Jim, having toured all over Europe as a musician-for-hire with everyone from Linda Martin to Dolores Keane, had turned down a lucrative job offer from Paul Brady. He had decided to plough his own furrow with his three sisters, with help from those who would give it (his parents, John Hughes, Barry Gaster, Jean Kennedy Smith). It was all or nothing. Do or die. He would still go home to get his washing done.
The big house is owned by the Cox family, famous in Dundalk for owning half the county. (We bump into Bunny Cox as we come into the estate. "Remember me?" Jim asks.) After school, the girls used to call over and visit their brother. They would rehearse in the upstairs room. There was a small eight-track recording studio in which they made their first demos. Upstairs, the four of them would practise these faintly ridiculous dance moves together in front of these mirrors with a video camera.
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