Blog

Sinéad was a creative genius, unique in every way and it would be hard to find an artist who sang and spoke so directly and so passionately about human rights, equality, peace, love, trauma, war and the systems of abuse within the Catholic Church. She was vilified for telling the truth. It is something we hear all the time: the messenger always gets shot. The Pope apologised in 2008 for the widespread child abuse that was uncovered, 16 long years after Sinéad famously ripped up a picture of the Pope on live TV. She was reacting to the Papal visit to Ireland at the time when he said he loved the Irish people. Those hollow words made abuse victims like Sinéad O'Connor more silent and invisible than they were already. 

Speaking about her live TV protest in 1992, Sinéad said this in a Times interview:

“It’s not the man, obviously - it’s the office and the symbol of the organisation that he represents. In Ireland, we see our people manifesting the highest incidence in Europe of child abuse. The priests have been beating the shit out of children for years and sexually abusing them. This is the example that’s been set for the people of Ireland. They have been controlled by the church, the very people who authorised what was done to them, who gave permission for what was done to them.”

Sinéad’s protest was a powerful display of disgust from someone who loved the church from an early age. She felt it was her place to speak out about something she knew and loved. We expect victims of domestic violence to do the same when they suffer terror and abuse in the home so why couldn’t Sinéad? We know why. Sinéad was exposing crimes of the state, she spoke of something that threatened the system itself and how quickly the blind faithful boo-ed and cancelled her songs and turned the other cheek and tried to deny and diminish the horrors that took place over many years. This is why so many millions will always love and be inspired by Sinéad. She didn’t set out to be braver than the rest but she ended up living a life defined by survival, integrity, compassion and courage.  

Sinéad has shown that we must speak out, regardless of the consequences. I would love to see a line forming with Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and every other political prisoner around the world leading the way. Systems of abuse must be brought down and only we can do it. The system won’t self-destruct. Sinéad proved the voice is mightier than the sword. Be inspired and be the change you want to see. 

As Sinéad said, they tried to bury me but they didn’t realise I was a seed.

Two years ago, Sinéad released the story of her life. The book is called REMEMBERINGS and currently, it is sold out everywhere, however, there is an audible version available here:

REMEMBERINGS - AUDIBLE BOOK

What follows is the Guardian book review by Fiona Sturgess, 11th June 2021

As a young woman starting out in music, Sinéad O’Connor rarely did what she was told. When Nigel Grainge, an executive at her label, asked her to stop wearing her hair short and dress more like a girl, she went straight out and got her head shaved. While recording her first album, she discovered she was pregnant, prompting Grainge to phone her doctor and tell him to warn her against having a baby. The doctor duly told her that women shouldn’t take babies on tour but neither should they go on tour without them. O’Connor ignored them both and had her son anyway.

Then in 1992, during a performance on Saturday Night Live, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II and blew up her career. She knew exactly what she was doing. “Everyone wants a pop star, see?” she writes. “But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame.”

Rememberings, then, is a tremendous catalogue of female misbehaviour. Music memoirs tend to follow similar trajectories of ambition, success and depravity followed by regret and redemption. But O’Connor doesn’t do regret, and redemption isn’t required – at least not by her. She wanted to make a living as a performer but her idea of success wasn’t the same as other people’s. “I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit before I made one with the music business,” she explains. “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl.”

The writing is spare and conversational and reveals O’Connor as self-deprecating, pragmatic and a sharp observer. She is funny, too. During a tour of America in 1990, there was an outcry after it was reported she had demanded “The Star-Spangled Banner” not be played before her gigs. MC Hammer made a big show of buying her a first-class plane ticket back to Ireland, while Frank Sinatra said she should have her arse kicked. People began steamrollering her albums outside her record company HQ in New York. “Intensely angry old people (with pointy noses) operating the steamrollers,” she hoots. In the end, O’Connor put on a wig and sunglasses and joined the throng. When a news crew turned up, she gave an interview pretending to be from Saratoga. “They ran it later on the news, with the caption Is that her? Running and re-running the footage of my ‘interview’. Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

As a child, O’Connor endured fierce beatings from her mother. She once won a prize at nursery school for being able to roll up into the smallest ball ­– “but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well”. She rarely went to school and would steal compulsively: “If a thing ain’t nailed down, I’m stealing it.” She picked up the habit from her mother, who would take money from the collection plate at mass rather than putting it in. Later, she and her mum would steal from charity tins. Full of guilt, O’Connor went to see her local priest who made her promise to give the money back when she got a job, and that way she’d be square with God (she was true to her word, giving her LA home to the Red Cross). She eventually left home to live with her father after her mother locked her and her siblings out in the garden all night. She later recalls being sent to a convent boarding school, where a nun bought her a guitar and a book of Bob Dylan songs, and encouraged her to sing.

There are stories from the height of her success, too, most of them underlining the hollowness of the experience. She is summoned to visit Prince, whom she brilliantly calls “Ol’ Fluffy Cuffs”, and who treats her atrociously. He tells her off for swearing, demands that she eat soup even though she has declined it and insists on a pillow fight. It turns out his pillow has something solid in it: “He ain’t playing at all.” She runs out of the house and towards a nearby highway, though Prince catches up with her in his car and orders her back. She eventually escapes into a stranger’s driveway and rings the doorbell.

In the book’s foreword, O’Connor says that before she ripped up the picture of the pope, she never had the chance to find herself. “But I think you’ll see in this book a girl who does find herself,” she writes, “not by success in the music industry but by taking the opportunity to sensibly and truly lose her marbles. The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.” While her childhood and rise to fame provide rich material, O’Connor, who is 54, says she can’t remember much of the past 20 years, “because I wasn’t really present until six months ago”.

As such, the final chapters, which sprint through her marriages, children, a traumatic hysterectomy and spells in mental institutions, are episodic. But they remain, like the rest of her book, full of heart, humour and remarkable generosity. The postscript comes in the form of a letter to her father. “Please know that your daughter would have been as nutty as a fuckin’ fruitcake and as crazy as a loon even if she’d had Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary for parents and grown up in the Little House on the Prairie,” she tells him. “So don’t be kicking the walls unless it’s just for fun.”

 Rememberings is published by Penguin Books