The lonely passion of Fionnuala Sherry

In 1995, the Sunday Independent's Keane Edge reported that Fionnuala offered David Agnew a shoulder to cry on, as well as a loan of her car, which Twink bounced out of the way with her 4x4, referring with typical pithiness to Fionnuala as a wagon.

What was your reaction when you saw your car?

"I actually didn't notice it for a few days," says Fionnuala, smiling. "It happened in their garden. I lent David my car. Do you think he is going to have an affair with me and then drive my car home? No.It was a great story for the newspapers because she is a lively woman."

The beautiful strawberry blonde - and violining phenomenon who has worked with everyone from the Chieftains, Sinead O'Connor and Van Morrison to Bono - says with a laugh that she didn't have a problem with the incident. "It was a rust-bucket Toyota! It was all I could afford in the auction. But that's OK. They were having their problems and that was just to show a temper by ramming something," she smiles.

"That story would never, ever, ever have appeared in the back column except it was just three weeks after I won the Eurovision. I was a nobody before I won the Eurovision. Suddenly I was news. I was like: 'Hello, talk about attaching your dirty laundry with a peg to something else!' It was hurtful for me for the timing of it. But apart from anything else, I didn't give a shite, because it had nothing to do with me."

So why did Twink seem to think you were having an affair with her husband? She gives the answer considerable thought before replying. "I think . . . " she begins, before trailing off again. "First of all," she resumes, she believes that David Agnew and his girlfriend Ruth Hickey's relationship being in the public eye "is horrendous. I know it is great for journalists but I think it is appalling to air because there are two beautiful girls involved. And I don't want to be the person to feed this. But all I know - and this is my only comment on this - is that Twink was led to believe that maybe there was something with David and I because maybe I was a cover-up, or a fall girl or whatever." (She says she doesn't know the identity of the woman she might or might not have been the cover-up for.)

In 2000, when I directly asked Twink whether part of the problem in her marriage was the alleged Fionnuala Sherry affair, her remarks appeared to tally with Sherry's comments to me now. "That wasn't an affair," Twink replied, riven with anger like a ship in a storm. "There was another serious major player-woman." (Twink added that the other woman was just a "slapper dotcom. Just a gold-digger. Digging in a plantation that had no gold! [Laughs] As most of them are dumb enough to do!")

"That's exactly what I've just said to you," Sherrysays when I repeat to her Twink's view that Fionnuala wasn't involved in an affair. "And I'm sure Twink deep in her heart really has nothing to hate me for, and I think she actually knows that."

I'm sure she does. No matter what way you approach her, Fionnuala Sherry is a formidable woman, equal parts charming, intelligent and tough (it has taken over seven months of persuasion to get her to do this interview). She has never spoken about David Agnew - of whom more later - publicly before, nor, I suspect, will again.

For over 10 years, she has been one half of the internationally successful group Secret Garden with Rolf Lovland. When I meet her in Town Bar & Grill in Dublin, Sherry has just returned from a sell-out tour of Korea, where Secret Garden played to over 4,000 people a day.

In her late teens, she studied music in Trinity College, Dublin, before becoming first violinist with the RTE Concert Orchestra. She has lost none of her elan now.

"The music is quite emotional," she says, referring to Secret Garden's new album, Earthsongs. "It comes from deep, deep down, and I don't think it is possible to just toss off any oul' tune. It is like the fiddle and me are all the same thing. I have never played the same song the same way twice. Once I walk on that stage I am on that stage for over two hours and you have got to connect to the audience. And you have got to deliver and make it a fabulous evening for everybody. You can really feel the energy." Sherry first felt that energy from her parents as a young child growing up in the then sleepy town of Naas.

"Our parents had a real passion for music and culture in the house. We were like the Partridge family," Sherry recalls. She can remember going on holidays on a coach that her dad Ben had smuggled in from England in the middle of the night - they had an uncle that worked in the docks. Ben renovated said illegally imported vehicle and painted it pale green and cream, and the Sherry family would happily travel around the country for summer holidays on their magic bus . . . singing and playing their violins and whatever-you're-having-yourself in the back.

"We did practise playing on the bus, but every August we would join a bunch of families and stay on Curracloe beach in Wexford. Our friend TC Kelly, the late Irish composer and arranger, would create tunes and arrangements for all of us, from the smallest up, and then we would give a concert in the local Butlers cafe. It was brilliant fun as everybody took part, and that was due to TC's creativity."

Sherry, now one of the most famous violinists in the world, recalls it was "the sound of the instrument she loved" from a very early age. "I think when you're either a musician or an artist, I actually think it chooses you rather than the other way around. There is something that drives you and sparks you when you're very young," she says with no little passion as she tucks into her cod. "You are compelled to do it. Something inside just makes you want to do it."

That something inside perhaps emerged from her father, whom she clearlyidolised. Ben was something of a whizz of a chemistry teacher at Clongowes - he wrote the chemistry book that was used in the schools around the country. He was also on Telefis Scoile in the Sixties in the afternoons on RTE. She has vivid memories of being seven years of age and coming home from St Mary's national school in Naas, walking into the kitchen and seeing her father sitting on the couch, "but his face was also in this black and white box. It was an amazing feeling that kids will never have now because from the moment they are born they are bombarded with technology."

It was a deepening darkness, however, that Fionnuala was bombarded with for the last few years of her father's life. When Ben died, aged 74, from Alzheimer's Disease, a condition he had for eight years, it was "a release but not a release in a way, because we watched him die for the last couple of years", she says.

Alzheimer's, she says, is a horrible, lingering death. Her father was a very smart, interesting man and very funny and "for someone like that, for his mind to go, I think I would rather have watched him physically go. There was this strong person with a gaga mind. It was horrible."

When what Billboard magazine called the "unlikely team-up between an Irish concert violinist and a Norwegian composer won top honours at the 40th annual Eurovision Song Contest" in 1995 - the very first public appearance of Secret Garden - with their folk-classical mutant Nocturne, suddenly Sherry's name was recognised all over the world. Her own father barely recognised her.

"When Eurovision happened he had recognition, a flicker, and then the light would go out again. That's the thing with Alzheimer's. It is sort of stages. It goes down and then there is another level and then there is another and the last level is when they physically all fall apart."

That happened on June 19, 1996. Sherry flew home from Norway, where she was recording with Secret Garden, knowing her father didn't have long to live. It was an extremely tough time but none of the previous years had exactly been joyous for the Sherry family. Fionnuala describes driving around with her sister Eithne looking for a nursing home for her ill father (where he remained for four years) as one of the hardest things she ever had to do in her life. There is a time caring for an Alzheimer's patient when you have to get professional help, she says. "My mother is a wee dotey little thing and there was no way that she could nurse my dad."

There is no denying her beauty as she picks her way through lunch. It is this same piercing pulchritude, presumably, that sparked rumours about George Clooney taking her out to dinnerin Los Angeles a few years ago. She denies it ever happened. She also denies that her partnership with the intriguingly named Rolf Lovland in Secret Garden is anything more than musical.

Despite the indisputable fact there would be a long queue of men anxious to make sweet music with Sherry, she claims to be unable to find a man. "Men just don't fall off trees," she laughs, munching on her apple tart. "I just haven't found Mr Right. I haven't found anyone I had wanted to commit to."

Living in Foxrock in Dublin for six years, Sherry describes herself as a career woman who is self-sustaining. I ask if there is ever part of heras a woman which wonders about the conflict between choosing career and choosing motherhood. "Well, I lost my last relationship, with Andy Brown, because of the career in terms of travelling. Thereis no doubt about that. We didn't sort of fall out of love with each other. He wanted children.

"I was at the perfect age to have a child and start a family," she says, without specifying that age, "when you're mature enough and you can handle all the shit, basically - and women's bodies now are in such good shape compared to a generation or two ago. You don't have to be in your early 20s to have a child."

But psychologically why didn't you want to be a mother at that point in your life?

"Maybe I was just very selfish," she answers. "It was, like, in between records. We did five records in a 10-year period because of the amount of work involved in one of those albums. I guess I just finished one, and a tour would be coming, and Andy in the meantime would be saying to me he wanted to start a family. I went: 'Wait for another few months. Can we do this?' Then there was everybody's else's wedding, and I was never there. So he was going to every function on his own as a single man. Enough was enough."

They were together from 1995 to 2001. Painter-decorator Brown is now engaged to a "fabulous girl" and livingin Sydney. I ask her whether she regrets it now that Andy is gone. She is honest enough to admit that she was "heartbroken" when he was actually leaving for Australia. "I found it very difficult, becausewhen we split up we were very close here."

She has been Down Under twice on tour. Brown went to see Secret Garden perform in the Sydney Opera House "and that was fantastic". The first time she met Brown's new love, Sherry admits, she was "shaking like a leaf, and who wouldn't? And I'm sure she was terrified too. Meeting them and going to their new apartment. It was very hard. But part of you has to say life has moved on. He has moved on and because I loved him enough I had to say I was happy for him because he did make the right decision. It is a big thing to say."

Even though she loved Andy, Sherry adds, she was also instinctively holding back, because "maybe he wasn't the full partner-for-life material. He was younger than me and I felt there was a lot of immaturity in things there. So there was a lot of other things surfacing. I was concerned too about financial things, because if I stopped to have a baby I was afraid whether we could afford to have a baby or not.

"I know that's not the reason to have a baby - whether you can afford it - but I was too practical," she continues. "But anyway, I made the wrong choices. I don't regret not having a baby, but sometimes I think it would be nice. But life would be different. The clock is ticking."

I suggest that she could go out tonight and sleep with some good man and lie to him and tell him she is on the pill, and get pregnant, and not have to see him again . . .

"Even though I admire single mothers, and the super-duper career women that can do it all - I have a very good friend in Norway who is a single woman who has just turned 40, working as a really high-powered TV executive, who has adopted two Chinese babies. And I'm going: why? She has no partner, no significant person in her life, not even a partner she is dating. I don't think it is fair to the child. It is fair to herself. I don't want to do that. I would love the happy-family package. I don't think any girl doesn't wish for that."

One of Ireland's most striking women, Sherry has had three "fairly long relationships": pre-Andy Brown, there was Gerry McColgan ("for six years too") and "an Indian/Irish guy". As the coffees arrive, we begin a discussion on commitment. "It is true that when it comes to committing, maybe I'm a bit like the runaway bride." Her older sister Eithne, she says with a laugh, is divorced. "So the two girls are disasters."

Why is that? Because their father was such an idol?"No. I say to my mother:'If I could only meet someone like my brothers!'" Shelaughs hysterically.

Fionnuala threw a hysterical hissy fit in an airportin Phoenix, Arizona, a few years ago when she left her violin and her wallet with money and everything in it on a plane. She got off the flight at a stopover in Santa Fe and vanished to the smoking room (she has since given up) for an hour, only to return to find the plane gone without her.

Six hours later in an another airport, in an attempt to track down her beloved instrument, she was screaming at the plane to stop when a man tapped her on the shoulder to enquire whether she was Glenn Close. It was almost fatal attraction for him, because she bit his head off: "No, I'm not Glenn Close!"

Just who Fionnuala Sherry is, however, is a mystery I can solve easily enough from spending two hours with her. She is a complex, modern woman with bite who felt the enormous gravitational pull of ambition from an early age. She is almost zen in the way she is relaxed inher own body. (And hopefully that slim, sexy body will be even more relaxed and tanned when she returns from a holiday in the Caribbean after Christmas.)

Sherry could have imposed a veto on certain subjects (ie Twink), but didn't. There is no denial or evasion with her. Quite the contrary. She laughs when I ask was David Agnew a father figure for her.

"No. A brother. David was best friends with my eldest brother Brian. His dad Niall Agnew and my dad sang in the RTE Choir . . . "

I feel it is time to cut tothe chase. What actuallyhappened between you and David Agnew?

"I don't think anything happened," she says. "This is a man who has been a very close friend all my life. When I went to boarding school at 15 and 16, David used to walk me from the College of Music around to the school. I have known him forever. We were all in the youth orchestra together. For everyone who grew up in the youth orchestra it was like a friendship seed for life. I can't explain it."

Did you have a physical relationship with David?

"Never. Never. I couldn't."

You are not lying to me?

"I am not lying to you," she says, looking me straight in the eyes with those mesmerising hazel-green eyes of hers."I didn't have anythingwith him."

You never had sex with him?

"No, no! God, no! Are you trying to upset me, Barry? I didn't, no! Like, oh my God, if my mother even sees that question. I didn't." (Speaking of mothers, she says that David was polite enough to ring her mother Brida to say that "there might be things in the paper when Twink and he were splitting up two years ago or whatever".)

Fionnuala Sherry kept her silence, and her dignity, throughout it all. "I could have really lashed out at all of that and tried to defend my name, but what's the point?" she asks, rhetorically. "To be honest with you, I can't understand why there is allowed to be so much publicity on both sides, because there are two beautiful girls there who are seriously suffering."

Twink must be suffering too, I say. Her husband has gone off with a woman 20 years her junior who's become pregnant . . .

"Everybody's point can be seen, and in a situation like that there are no winners. There is only, like, peoplesuffering. The best way isfor everybody to settle down and adjust. I have admiration for both sides but I'm notgoing to be dragged into something yet again. My career and how I am is too important to be dragged into somebody's situation."

Sherry's current situation is that she is not, she says, "in a relationship. I have fabulous times but I just haven't met someone who is a lifelong partner who I am willing to make that commitment to. That doesn't mean I am sitting in knitting in the evenings," she laughs.

"It is harder to meet people here. I'm not a huge drinker. I don't particularly like hanging out in pubs. It does help if you hang out in pubs." She jokes that she doesn't get groupies the way the men in Secret Garden do, as men don't tend to proposition female stars after concerts.

Perhaps that's what secret gardens should be for . . .