An Interview By Barry Egan of Ireland's Sunday Independent.

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 BARRY EGAN.

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 that you felt you could trust Gavin unconditionally?

"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.