DINAH O'Dowd is holding court in the lounge in the Merrion Hotel, sipping tea and talking non-stop.

Dressed in a navy suit and turquoise top, she flies through anecdotes and opinions: the time she went to a Versace fashion show ("how do those models walk in those heels?"); the time her daughter stayed with a teenage millionaire in New York ("she didn't even know where the washing machine was. When they found it, she didn't even know how to switch it on."); how she thinks Victoria Beckham is killing herself ("did you see those pictures of Posh in the paper yesterday, oh my God, she just looks awful thin");

how her son, Boy George, is sick of renting his Hampstead home out, and wants to leave his temporary residence in Old Street to go back.

The photographer Stephen Ryan remarks that he saw the house on MTV Cribs once. "Oh yeah, " says O'Dowd. "You know, he has a copper bath. I said, Georgie, how on earth are you meant to get in a copper bath with hot water.

Copper retains heat you see, " she nods sagely. "He said 'don't worry ma, I only use the shower anyway'.

He just wanted the copper bath, " she laughs.

Her accent is a strange mixture of old Dublin and old London. One half of a sentence can be pure East End, the other 100% Dublin.

Words flow from her non-stop, tangents can last for 10, 15 minutes (at one point, while discussing something else entirely, she decides to go through every dog that her family ever owned, how they came to live with her family and how they died). Such is her way with words, it's no wonder that O'Dowd has written a book.

Cry Salty Tears is about O'Dowd's life, primarily her marriage of more than 40 years to a psychotically abusive husband, Gerry. He beat her and mentally abused her and had affairs. She gave birth to and raised six children. Now that he's dead, she has decided to tell everything. Her family support her, Boy George even wrote the forward: "Mum always said 'women live longer because they cry'."

As we walk up to her room, we pass an old photograph hanging in the corridor of a Dublin tenement.

"Now that's the Dublin I remember, " O'Dowd says, pointing at the picture.

O'Dowd grew up in Dublin in the poverty-stricken 1950s, became pregnant as a teenager and left aged 19 for London. She met her husband when he dropped into the pub she was working in, the Duchess of Wellington. The mental abuse began shortly after. She left once, and went to her parents in Birmingham.

"I put Georgie in the push chair, got Kevin and Richard by the hand. I was sitting on the train in Paddington, crying. I thought, 'what am I doing, where am I going to go?' " When she got there, her mother couldn't put her up because she was living in someone else's house. She moved into a hostel.

"My father said, 'you can't take his children away from him. You cannot take a man's children away from him. You've made your bed and you must lie in it'. I hated me Dad that day. My mam said 'she doesn't go back if she doesn't want to'. My Dad just said 'she has'."

Once, Gerry thought he had killed his wife. After an argument with her over having another man in the house (she had bought something off a tradesman who came to her door), "he went to punch me, and I put my head back out of the way, hit me head off the window and knocked meself cold."

On other occasions, he beat her while she was pregnant and once threw a plate at her head. O'Dowd remembers every detail of every incident and recounts them as if they occurred only yesterday. It's something that also surprised her husband, who told her that he didn't remember the number of times he had beaten her. She thought their marriage would improve when she gave birth to her sixth child, Siobhan. "I was absolutely cock-a-hoop having a daughter after five sons. I thought, this will be great, he'll be really pleased, he'll change, I'll see her melt his heart and all the rest. But it didn't happen." She pauses and rubs the corner of her eye.

O'Dowd speaks about her most famous son - as she does of all of her children - with great affection.

When his recent run-in with the law is brought up (George called police to his apartment in New York reporting a break-in. There was no break-in, but they did find a quantity of cocaine, and he was sentenced to community service), she replies: "to me, that is stupidity personified, I'm afraid, " she sighs. At first, you think O'Dowd is commenting on her son's behaviour, but quite the opposite.

She is defending him, and criticising the media circus.

"He offered to do a concert, he offered to give 10 grand to charity, but no, they had to make it known that he was going to do something, so sweep the streets of New York.

The whole thing was set up - I don't know how many photographers were there, but it was just a joke. For God's sake, there are people getting killed left, right and centre in Iraq, and they're worried about him sweeping the streets."

George rang his Mum to tell her that the press were getting on his nerves.

"Just get your broom, " she told him, "and sweep. You've got a job to do, do it." When it was all over, the authorities told George that he was one of the best workers they ever had.

O'Dowd is clearly delighted at having written a book. She talks about the surrealness of seeing on the shelves of airport bookshops.

"My husband was always going on about writing a book, all his life, about this or that and the other, but he never did it. And David [her son] rang me up and said: 'he spent 40 years talking about writing a book. And here you are and you've done it, it's published, and you're having interviews about it and everything.' It's scary though, I said, and he said, 'do you know what, Mam? I'm proud of you'.

"I can't ask for anything else."