'Our priorities are upside down': When Sinéad O'Connor wrote a piece for the Irish Examiner
Sinéad O'Connor in 2012. (Picture: David Corio/Redferns)
In February 2013, Sinéad O’Connor wrote an opinion piece for the Arts/Culture page of the . It originally came about via the late singer’s visit to Cork to sing at Triskel Christchurch as part of a fundraiser for the city’s Mad Pride event, an event that also served as a tribute to that organisation's founder, John McCarthy.
The piece for the was written in the wake of the Children’s Referendum, a vote on an amendment to the Irish Constitution regarding children’s rights. A majority voted in favour of the amendment, but the turnout was, for O’Connor, a disappointingly low 35.5%.
While I was living in High Park Laundry, in 1982, I saw my best friend’s baby torn from her arms by three nuns. My friend never saw her baby again. The flaccid, so-called apologies made today by the nuns who ran High Park, for what they loosely refer to as ‘the hurt’ these women experienced, are an insult to all babies of whom no records were kept.
Only 33.5% of Irish people voted either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in the children’s referendum. This not-giving-of-a-toss showed why we needed a referendum, as embarrassing as it is that we needed such a thing in 2012. Some people say it [the poor turn-out] was because people didn’t understand the document. That’s nonsense. In the Lisbon referendum, we voted ‘No’ because we didn’t understand it.
It was about money, so we cared. If you didn’t understand the children’s referendum, you should have cared enough to vote ‘No’, as you did with the Lisbon Treaty.
Given that child abuse had been so prevalent in Ireland in the previous 10 years, it is more distressing that 66.5% of people couldn’t be bothered whether or not children were given the right, in the Constitution, to be protected from abuse and to exist as individuals in their own right.
Although, of course, I was a ‘Yes’ voter, I am alarmed by the concerns of the ‘No’ side being ignored by 66.5% of the population, because should the concerns of the ‘No’ side become reality, then children would need all the more protection. Amnesty International appropriately named their report on the Church, ‘In Plain Sight’.
They made the point that the majority of people knew, roughly, somewhat of what had been going on in Ireland. We all knew what was behind the tall walls, yet we just walked past. We assumed they were problem children and we didn’t care.
We showed, on Nov 10 [the date of the referendum vote], that we are a people who turn our faces away from children and we can never again, entirely blame the Church for what took place.
The final piece in the puzzle as to why all this child abuse happened was answered on Nov 10. It happened because we couldn’t be bothered with anything but material-gain, we are a materialistic people who would have got off our butts to vote on Nov 10 had the referendum been about money. We have our priorities absolutely spiritually upside down, and that is why we are now in economic crisis.
