| NICKY AND GEORGINA ARTICLE |
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| From Hello Magazine |
| Every day the two 12-year-olds stared longingly across the Dublin classroom at each other with expressions of undying love written on their faces. The boy told his mother: “I’ve found the girl I’m going to marry.” Today that girl, Georgina, is the daughter of Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, and the boy has grown up to become Westlife heart-throb Nicky Byrne. But all these years later, despite Nicky’s boast about having found his future wife, marriage isn’t top of the agenda. In fact, they’re not even engaged – and it seems unlikely that they will in the foreseeable future. And yet none of this is connected with the widely held belief that the Westlife boys – Nicky, Bryan, Kian, Shane and Mark – has some sort of “gentleman’s agreement” with their manager not to have children or get married in the next four years. For a start, Bryan McFadden is already engaged to former Atomic Kitten star Kerry Katona and the couple, who plan to marry next year, are expecting their first baby in September. So what lies behind the supposed “agreement” and the refusal of former childhood sweethearts Nicky and Georgina to become engaged, let alone make any firm marriage plans? HELLO! joined the couple at a romantic chateau in France to find the answer to these mysteries. “At the beginning, when we were a young band, the press immediately wanted to know which of us had girlfriends,” explains Nicky, 22. “At the time, I was the only one with a girlfriend and she was the Irish Prime Minister’s daughter. Our management turned round and said, “None of the Westlife boys is going to get married or have kids in the next five years. This band is going to be bigger than anything that’s come out of Ireland and there’s not going to be anything to stop them sky-rocketing. But there was no gentleman’s agreement. We didn’t deny it because, at the time, it suited our purposes not to.” University student Georgina, who is 22 in May, nods. There’s little she doesn’t know about Westlife in general and Nicky in particular. She has been with the blond Dubliner through thick and thin. She spurred him on when, at 16, he joined Leeds United’s youth team and, two years later, she consoled hjim when the budding goalkeeper was thrown on the scrapheap because he was deemed too short at 5ft 10 in. They have also just bought a four-bedroom house not far from Dublin and Georgina was involved in every stage of the house-hunting process. Nicky confesses that he doesn’t know how he’d survive without her. “She’s my rock,” he says. And, for her part, Georgina states: “Nicky is totally, completely, my life.” For more on the teen pin-up and his girlfriend, |
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