Ed Power: Stunned grief at death of incomparable Sinéad
Sinéad O'Connor in a still from the video for 'Nothing Compares 2 U', one of her many iconic songs.
Nothing compared to Sinéad O’Connor. The singer, who has passed away aged 56, was an icon of Irish music — and a powerful female voice in a nation where women were historically downtrodden.
But as the country reels from the shocking news of her death, what we perhaps think of her first are her songs — the vulnerable shriek that rippled like electricity through her early hit, 'Mandinka', the heartache burnt into 'Nothing Compares 2 U', the tear she shed in the accompanying video, her definitive version of the great Celtic lament 'She Moves Through The Fair.'
She was a unique Irish person in that she was prepared to talk about her feelings. But she did so with wit and warmth — as those who first got to know her as a guest on Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show will recall.
This when she was on her way to becoming Ireland’s biggest musical export since U2, first with her debut album, , then with 'Nothing Compares 2 U' and the accompanying long player, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got.
The music communicated a world of hurt — pain that O’Connor had lived through from childhood and which continued to haunt her even as she conquered the charts.
She was born in 1966 in Dublin. The apocryphal story is that the doctor who delivered her was the son of Éamon de Valera, and that O’Connor was named after his mother, Sinéad de Valera. Her father, John, was a structural engineer who retrained as a barrister. Her mother Marie was highly religious and, O’Connor would later say, emotionally and physically abusive towards her.
“My mother was a very violent woman. Not a healthy woman at all,” O’Connor said in the 2022 music documentary . She added:
Marie died in a car crash in 1985. O’Connor was 18. In the shadow of that tragedy, her music career began to take off. In the mid-1980s, U2 had turned a spotlight on the Dublin music.
O’Connor’s talent — the voice that glinted like shattered glass — had been a talking about around Dublin, and she acquired an influential manager in Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh, former head of U2’s bespoke label, Mother Records.
In 1987, she confirmed her talent with her debut LP, , and the single 'Mandinka'. Critics raved. “ A banshee wail across the bogs,” said , which hailed it one of the year’s “most distinctive debuts”.
O’Connor was just getting started. In 1990, she released a cover of an obscure Prince track, 'Nothing Compares 2 U'. In the video, thinking of her mother, a tear rolled down the singer’s cheek. The song and the image were crystallised in pop history, going to number one around the globe.
But O’Connor didn’t crave fame. For her, music was a way of soothing her demons. Celebrity merely stirred them up. She made her feelings plain in October 1992 when ripping up a portrait of the Pope on Saturday Night Live — a gesture that genuinely stunned America and damaged her standing there.
“Today, our superstars are expected to speak out. That certainly wasn’t the norm or the trend back then,” Kathryn Ferguson, director of told me last year.
“A lot of what she was speaking about was unpalatable at the time. It wasn’t “cool” activism, with which you could get on board — that activism with a tiny 'a'. It was subject matter that was very hard for people to hear. And that was part of the problem.”
O’Connor would never again approach the heights she had reached with 'Nothing Compares 2 U'. Her career would have its ups and downs, as would her private life — she lost her son, Shane, last year at age 17. Yet her star never dimmed.
It is a measure of how important she was to Ireland and the world that the news of her death has been met not with the standard outpourings of sorrow, but with stunned grief. She advocated for Irish women and Irish music when neither had a voice and that is why her loss is so deeply felt.
