POP star Ed Sheeran has been left devastated after the death of his Irish grandmother who inspired one of his best known tunes.
Anne Mary, but known as ‘Nancy’, Sheeran née Mulligan, from Gorey, Co Wexford died peacefully at Castle Gardens Nursing Home in Enniscorthy last Tuesday.
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Anne was remembered as “beloved wife of the late Bill and loving mother of Jim, Bill, Peter, Chris, John, MaryAnne, Bridget and the late Sally and sister of the late Thomas, Jim, May and Peggy.
“Deeply regretted by her loving sons, daughters, grandchildren, great grandchildren, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, niece, nephews, relatives, friends and neighbours.”
She will be laid to rest on Wednesday after 11am funeral mass in St Patrick’s Church, Monaseed, Gorey.
Songwriter Ed penned the song Nancy Mulligan, on his third album Divide in 2017, about the romance between grandmother Anne, and his grandfather William, who pre-deceased her, getting married despite being from different religions.
Dad-of-two Ed, 32, said: “Nancy Mulligan is about my grandfather and my grandmother.
“My grandfather is a Protestant from Belfast and my grandmother is a Catholic from Wexford and when they got married it was like a real thing.
“But they went against people, got married and ended up being married for 66 years before my grandfather passed away.”
Speaking to RTE News in 2017, the then 92-year-old Anne praised grandson Ed for remaining as down-to-earth as ever despite his massive success.
She said: “I’ll never think of him as being famous, I have to say. He’s exactly the same as he always is when he visits.
“And it’s very rare because he’s always working and when you think he was working from the age of 14, you’d have to feel sorry for him, you know he’s so tired but he loved it.”
Anne and her late husband William raised eight children and had 23 grandchildren.
It comes after Ed revealed the heartbreaking reason he wrote seven songs in just four hours.
The music superstar is seen sobbing in a Disney+ special documentary as he recalls fearing his pregnant wife might die.
He said he wrote the seven songs the day after his wife Cherry was diagnosed with cancer six months into her pregnancy with their second child, Jupiter, who turns one this month.
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The tumour needed surgery, but the couple were told that could not happen until after Cherry had given birth.
In the documentary Cherry Seaborn, 30, speaks in depth for the first time about her cancer ordeal.
She said: “Long story short, I got diagnosed with cancer at the start of the year, which was a massive s**tter, but it made me massively reflect on our mortality.”
On battling cancer, she added: “I was saying to Eds, I’d never have agreed to do anything like this before — never, ever, ever — but it made me think this whole year, if I died, what’s people’s perception of me?
“What am I going to leave behind? It genuinely wasn’t until this year when I was just like, ‘I might die’.
“We had the diagnosis of the tumour and the next day Eds went down into the basement and wrote seven songs in four hours.
“Some people write a diary and get their emotions out through the pen and, for Eds, if something really intense happens, he’ll go and write a song.”
Ed, 32, explained: “Music’s always been like therapy to me.
“It was a way to get my thoughts and feelings down as a kid, and it works. It really works.”
The four-part documentary was originally meant to be about Ed’s music career, but ended up focussing on the fallout from the events of February 2022.
It was the month that Cherry’s cancer diagnosis was quickly followed by the death of Ed’s close friend Jamal Edwards from a heart attack, aged 31.
Ed was also fighting a court case — which he won — over his hit Shape of You, which he was accused of plagiarising.
The star said: “That was a horrible, horrible, horrible month.
“Life hasn’t moved on for me yet and I don’t think it will.”
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