In August 2019, Foden, having relocated to New York for work, married his American girlfriend of two weeks, Jackie Belanoff Smith, on board a yacht in Nantucket, Massachusetts. It was a year after his divorce from his wife of six years.

The story of what Una went through is well known.

“It is almost comforting in a way because you know they know,” she says. “So they don’t have to ask you.”

“People are very nice, usually. They will be sympathetic or, in a lot of cases, empathetic. I am not alone in this situation I’ve been through. It happens all the time. In the UK, the divorce rate is 50pc. So, I am not alone. I think it is hard for everyone. I don’t regret anything, but it is really tough.”

Did it make her stronger?

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. That’s the way I feel. It is not something I would ever have wanted to happen, but I had to go through it. So, I wouldn’t want it to happen, but I wouldn’t take it back either because I wouldn’t have my children,” she says of Aoife and Tadhg. Una is open with her daughter Aoife, aged nine.

“We talk about it [the break-up]. She is very aware of everything,” she says.

Aoife and six-year-old Tadhg cope really well, she adds.

“That’s because they are so loved and cared for. Thankfully, they are really happy and have adapted to everything in life.”

As has Una, who hasn’t allowed herself to become cynical about romantic love.

“Because I wear my heart on my sleeve, I am not scared of it at all. Even after being hurt in the past, I am not scared. I still believe in love.”

So, how is her love life?

“I don’t have one at the minute. It has been very hard for anyone that is single during Covid. It is just the worst time to be single because there are no opportunities to meet people.”

She is looking for someone who gets her – in December 2018, she briefly dated Limerick hurler David Breen.

Last week she got a letter from a woman in Dublin which she was touched by. The letter said: “You are your own person. Don’t talk about him any more.”

Is it sexist to be asked about her divorce?

“Yeah, because men don’t get asked very often on chat shows about their personal life,” she says, seemingly a reference to her recent appearance on The Late Late Show.

“It doesn’t happen, not in depth. I don’t regret the moments I have spoken about it. I say whatever I feel is enough without giving him airtime because he is… there is a point in talking about him.”  

Yes, she wears her heart on her sleeve. She believes you have to in order to be a songwriter and an artist.

“I am very emotional. But I am openly emotional. I won’t hold it in, I can’t help it, it needs to come out. I wouldn’t hold in the tears either. If I need to cry, I let a good old cry out.”

This directness and authenticity is how she was raised and it has stood to her in life. Her mother Anne touches on this when she later describes her to me. “Una’s greatest strength is that she is a very honest and straightforward person,” she says.

“I am so very proud of her. She has always had a keen interest in learning about others and learning from them, ever since she was in school. She is hard-working and ambitious, and a bit of a perfectionist, which has probably been the secret to her success.

“She’s also a very forgiving person – once she’s made her peace with something, she will draw a line under it and move on.”

Una Healy’s uncle is country singer Declan Nerney, so it comes as no surprise that music has always been a part of her life. At home throughout her childhood, sing-songs were standard. At Christmas, Una (who was born in 1981), her big sister Deirdre and their cousins would have singing competitions. The winner would get a pound, or sweets.

She was too young to go to the Féile or Trip to Tipp music festivals in Semple Stadium in 1990 and 1991 to see Hothouse Flowers and Happy Mondays et al.

“I used to walk around the town when they were on, kicking the full cans on the street and taking them home, thinking my dad might want to drink them,” she laughs.

“I don’t think so! They were dented and dirty. I was 10 or 11.”

At 12, she started to learn guitar. She was taught the first few chords by her mother. Then, when her maternal grandfather, Dan Joe, passed away, she wrote a song for him, ‘I Missed You’, based on the chords she had just learned. That was the first song she wrote.

Dan Joe was a real character, she says.

“He died in the house that I am living in now. My mother cared for him just before he passed away. He became quite frail. He was 85 when he died. I was very sad.”

The year following Dan Joe’s death, Una saw Sheryl Crow sing ‘All I Wanna Do’ on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast.

“I instantly thought all I want to do is be like her one day. She was a rock chick with a guitar who wrote her own songs. I wanted to write songs like her too. “

One of those song she wrote when she was 15 was ‘Raider of My Sleep’.

“It was about when I couldn’t sleep because my mother told me that she had a lump, and I thought she was going to die of breast cancer. It turned out to be benign.

“I am so close to my mother. I was crying my eyes out down in the sitting room and I wrote this song about how I was feeling.”

Similarly, when she was bullied at school, Una found writing songs helpful with processing her emotions.

“Not that you would ever hear them because they were not recorded. I did demo them, though.”

The chorus to one song ‘You Lie’ went: “All you do is lie/You stab in the back and then you deny/You gotta realise that I can’t take any more.”

Una recalls that it was usually lunchtime when a gang would come up to her.

“They’d shout intimidating things and make me feel scared.”

What would they shout at her?

“There was a couple of times when they said, ‘we’re going to beat you up after school’. Just threatening things like that. But they were empty threats in the end.

“Nothing ever happened, but I would literally walk into school every morning worried and so scared that it might happen. I was really scared.

“My dad was a doctor in the town, so they managed to get the private phone number at home and a couple of times they rang the house. They would say things like, ‘I hope your house burns down’.”

Seriously?

“Oh yeah. My sister got that call one night. I was at my uncle Declan’s gig with my parents, and my sister was on her own at home. She said that they rang and said: ‘I hope the house burns down and I hope you die.’”

Una was 15. It didn’t happen enough for it to cause her any major concern, though. “To be honest, I feel it toughened me up as well. In a way, I am glad that those kind of things happened to me in life at a young age. I nearly left the school.

“But I didn’t give in to it. I have no grudge whatsoever at all to any of the people now. It never affected me further in life.”

And why didn’t it? “I don’t know. Maybe because I gave a bit back as well. I wasn’t one to just take anything that anyone said to me. I would stand up for myself.”

Find a career you can fall back on if the music doesn’t work out, her mother told her when she was 18.

At first, Una wanted to do nursing like her mother, who worked in Una’s father’s practice in Thurles. When she was 19, she studied nursing at the University of Limerick and shared a house in Limerick city centre – “It was the first time I lived away from home.”

On Fridays, she came back to Thurles with her washing; on Saturdays she did a residency at the Strand in Limerick, playing songs by Britney Spears and Neil Diamond. She would sell her CD, Sorry, for €5 at the gigs.

“I always knew at the back of my head that music was what I wanted to do with my life,” she says. At her mother’s suggestion, she gave herself five years to see if the music would work out.

In the meantime, 20-year-old Una found a placement in the surgical ward of Limerick regional hospital. It was tough going. She watched in admiration at how hard the nurses worked, but says: “I was also thinking that this wasn’t for me.”

One day in the hospital an old man kept asking for a cup of tea.

“When I brought him the tea , he said, ‘I don’t want it now’. Then he asked me to take him to the toilet. He was well able to go himself. But I brought him anyway.

“After he finished his number two, he looked at me and said, ‘aren’t you going to wipe it then?’ That was my last memories of working on the ward. I was 21, 22. That didn’t put me off, that was just a funny story more than anything.”

She dropped out of nursing and started devoting herself to gigs.

“I found something I loved with music. I would write at night. Songs about boyfriends, songs about the love life. That’s what every song is about really.”

She demoed a song called ‘Rusty, Dusty and Musty’ and dropped it into the local radio station Tip FM to see if they would give it a spin. The song was playlisted and became relatively big; at a gig in Templemore, Una was surprised that people were singing it back to her: “I know it’s been a long time, but I’ll give it another try. I’m waiting for you to call.”

“That song was about waiting for someone to ring you and you are starting to rust a bit,” she explains. “I was waiting to be discovered.”

In 2006, she co-wrote a duet ‘Every Melody’ with her then boyfriend. She entered it in the Glinsk Song Contest in Galway.

“The guy chose to go to the World Cup in Germany rather than go to the song contest with me. We broke up after that. I sang the song solo and won the contest.”

She was living in Dublin at the time, and in 2006 took the bus out to RTE in Donnybrook to audition for backing vocals representing Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest. Landing the gig, she backed up Brian Kennedy in Greece, on ‘Every Song is a Cry for Love’.

“It was a dream come true to be on that stage as I loved the Eurovision growing up.”

Still, when she returned home, she had a hard think about where it all was going. She was doing gigs in Searson’s pub on Baggot Street on Saturday night and O’Briens on Leeson Street on Sunday nights.

“The five years was coming to an end,” she says. “I was 25. My mum was throwing a prayer in for me.”

The prayers were answered. In 2007, she auditioned successfully for UK-based girl-group, The Saturdays. She became a star with the five-piece pop and dance outfit, courtesy of four top 10 albums and number 1 singles like ‘What About Us’ in 2012.

Two years later they did a Greatest Hits tour. They haven’t been heard of since.

She went on to present Una’s Dream Ticket on RTE in 2013, as well being a judge on RTÉ’s The Voice of Ireland in 2015. In 2017, she released The Waiting Game, a country music-style album.

“It did really well. It went top 30 in the UK on Decca records. But the music industry is so fickle, and they didn’t give me a second album. I sell my music independently now. I just release them myself as I go along. I just shot a video in the Wicklow mountains for a song coming out in the summer.”  

Una runs most days and swims in the evenings in the local pool or in the sea. She lived in England until last summer, when she moved back to Ireland, and says: “I found it tough being over there on my own.”

Now, she lives literally next door to her parents. “There is a laneway that connects both houses and we are literally between two houses all the time. They are there now to help out with the kids. It allows me to do things and work and have a life as well, because it is very difficult as a single parent to do it all on your own.

“Aoife and Tadhg are the best of friends. They have such a strong bond. I am so lucky they get on. They are always laughing and joking. I used to kill my sister,” she says referring to Deirdre, three-and-a-half years her senior. “We were always fighting.”

How does she think people see her?

“No idea! Hopefully not like ‘Rusty, Dusty and Musty’ anyway,” she laughs, getting up to walk home to the kids down the road.

“You know, everyone has found the last year strange. No one knows what life is going to throw at you or what is around the corner.”

And who would know that better than Una Healy?

 

Una spoke to People & Culture as the new face of make-up range IsaDora in Ireland. Una’s favourites from the IsaDora collection will feature in a capsule range and be available in selected pharmacies nationwide from tomorrow. For more information check out www.instagram.com/isadora_ireland