Bono has disclosed that one of his cousins is in fact his half-brother.
The revelation comes four months after the lead singer of U2 initially announced he had a sibling, whose parentage had been a family secret for decades.
Bono told Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne in June that his half-brother, whom he did not identify at the time, was the result of an affair between his father Bob and a ‘beautiful woman’ in the 1960s.
Now he has revealed that the woman was his aunt Barbara and that their son is the stock analyst and civil servant Scott Rankin.
Bono’s mother Iris passed away in 1974, when he was 14 years old, unaware of the infidelity.
Barbara, who currently resides in Dublin, was married to Jack, the brother of Iris, who passed away in 2020.
Bob and Iris’ affair at the time in traditional, Catholic Ireland would have had possibly life-altering repercussions if exposed; hence, it was buried for decades.
And Bono, whose true name is Paul Hewson, did not discover his father’s heartbreaking truth until the year 2000, a year before Bob’s death from cancer.
Yesterday, in an interview with the Irish Times, Bono, 62, spoke of his admiration for Mr Rankin, a father of three in his early 50s, and revealed that he believed they were more than cousins.
He said, “We felt like brothers long before we realized it.” I adore Scott and Barbara, his mother. I must have sensed that something was amiss, and I must have blamed my father for making my mother sad in the manner that children are apt to do.
Bono explained to Desert Island Discs that learning of his brother’s existence enabled him to comprehend his father’s behavior at the time of Iris’s unexpected death.
‘My father was going through a great deal,’ he said on the program.
Because his heart was elsewhere, his head was elsewhere.
It’s a really close-knit family, and I could tell that my father had a great bond with this attractive woman who was a family member; nonetheless, they had a child in secret.
Mr. Rankin’s professional path is diametrically opposed to that of Bono; he is reported to have worked for Ireland’s largest stockbroker, Davy Group, for more than 15 years before becoming a government servant with the Irish department of finance.
Olive Bryan, Iris’s younger sister, was distressed when this newspaper approached her following the Desert Island Discs disclosure. She stated, “I’d rather not discuss it because it’s far too personal.”
Another of Bono’s cousins, Trevor Stunt, stated, “Bono and his half-brother have a wonderful bond.”
It is a positive development, there is no hostility.’ He said that several family members were unaware of the affair until just prior to the broadcast of the Desert Island Discs episode.