Dolores was a rock star, but I remember her as a loving mother

WE became mothers at the same time. Our eldest children both came into the world in 1997, which prompted The Late Late Show to invite us on, the following Mother’s Day, to talk about our experiences as new mothers. Me and Dolores. Hers had been a far more positive experience of childbirth – I remember her talking about the wonder of touching Taylor’s head as he emerged into the world and toasting him with a glass of wine immediately afterwards.

Mine had involved so much medical intervention and high drama, it was a miracle I’d managed to fight my way through the tubes and monitors to make it to the studio at all. She was loving motherhood; I remember wishing I could be as chilled about it as she was. It really suited her, this erstwhile awkward young singer from Co. Limerick. By that time, she’d notched up millions of record sales. We had one of her gold records on our living room wall at home, because my English husband published The Cranberries. When we’d got engaged, Dolores spent a long time happily explaining to him why she could never marry an Englishman. She married a Canadian instead, and then we had our babies and then we had some more.

I don’t believe in defining women by their children, but when I think about Dolores O’Riordan, I think about her as a mother first, because after years of well-publicised crippling shyness and self-doubt, it felt to me that she’d found her peace through motherhood. Or maybe that was just one blissedout night. But years afterwards, I heard her say that her three children had saved her, that they were her rock.

When I heard the awful, shocking news on Monday afternoon, it was her children I thought of first. Her children, then her beloved mother Eileen, who was always quietly in her corner, her constant support.

And then, all the girls. If you’ve been watching the excellent Derry Girls for the past few weeks on Channel 4, then The Cranberries are already in your head; their hits punctuate the soundtrack, an accurate reflection of growing up on this island in the early 1990s.

It is hard now to overestimate the impact that Dolores O’Riordan had on young Irish women at that time. U2 were all very well and good, but they were an urban boys club. Sinéad was great, but she had gone the well-trodden London studio path to success. The Cranberries had paid their dues at university gigs in Limerick and dive bars in Dublin, where, as The Cranberry Saw Us, they had piqued the interest of audiences and critics who wished the tiny girl singer with the gigantic voice would turn around to face the crowd.

Dolores hadn’t been to a private school or flown on a private jet; she was every awkward Irish teenage girl who ever sang into a mirror with a hairbrush in her hand. In a bleak time of crippling recession, she was proof that anything – anyone – was possible. If ever a debut album title was a statement of intent, then it was the unlikely Limerick combo’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, Why Can’t We?

AND after the girls, all of us. Sometimes, a celebrity death doesn’t compute. You hear the name on the news and you expect the sentence to end differently. You’d heard The Cranberries were playing together again. You might even have known she was in London to record a version of Zombie with Bad Wolves. And in any event, you know, because you can measure them by your own children, that her children are still young, still her rock. And that she is young, 46, too young.

And celebrity deaths like that strike a particular chord. Because it’s so shocking to be almost unbelievable. Because it wasn’t in the script. Because she was extraordinary and ordinary. Because she was the voice of a generation, the most famous woman in Ireland. Because she was a daughter, a sister, a bandmate, a friend, a superstar. But mainly, right now, because she was a mother.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.