RTE star Claire Byrne has opened up about losing hope in finding love again after her divorce. The current affairs presenter, who has is now happily engaged to another man and has two young kids, said she didn’t think it was possible to start a family after her marriage ended.
Claire split with ex-husband Richard Johnson in 2005 and she’s now revealed that she didn’t think she would meet anyone else afterwards.
“I’d resigned myself to the fact that I might not get married again and might not have children and I was fine with that,” she said. “What was the point of me sitting at home and crying myself to sleep into my pillow?”
The 40-year-old said that she jetted off to the States to take her mind off her romance woes, and made sure to enjoy single life.
“I went to Nashville. I had a brilliant two years wandering around and having fun and I like to think that, as a consequence of not caring, it all happened for me,” she said.
The tv star said she later met her now-fiance Gerry Scollan, with whom she has son Patrick (1) and baby daughter Jane, and realised soon afterward that he was “the one”. The pair met during a night out in O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row, where the smitten IT consultant asked for her phone number.
“I didn’t know straight away, but after the first date I did know,”she told the Sunday Independent’s Living.
“I had been around quite a while at that stage. I think at one stage I would have hated people to say ‘When you know, you know’ – but that was how it worked out.
“We had so many similarities in our background – size of family, rural upbringing, the values we were raised with.”
Claire and Gerry first went public at the VIP Style Awards, and got engaged a year later – when they were washing the dishes! Who says romance is dead, eh?
