Rosita Sweetman: Sinéad fought the real enemy

Sinéad O'Connor was a child of an Ireland where Irish women had, for decades, been stripped of their power, their rage, by our Taliban — the Catholic Church

Sinead O'Connor Rips a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live 1992 - Fight the real enemy. Photo: NBC/Youtube

So we’ve lost Sinéad. That beautiful silver trumpet of a voice has been stilled. It’s horrible.

Drying our tears we could, of course, celebrate she was with us for so long.

Sinéad was only six when the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement was born, but while we were stomping the streets fighting for women’s rights she was being stomped on by her Mum who had descended from what Sinéad described as a shining beauty on her wedding day to four children and a broken marriage later into a psychotic ‘demon’. 

Dad, who had set up home elsewhere, got custody, but she and her younger brother, lonely for Mum, had gone home.

Their isolation in 1960s Ireland is unbearable to think about. With the Catholic Church insisting every pregnancy be brought to term, support for mothers, ‘drowning in babies’ and Valium, never mind their children, was non-existent.

Aged 15 and back with her Dad, Sinéad was put into ‘An Grianain’ an ex-Magdalene laundry where abandoned Magdalenes shuffled the corridors. She hated it, but it was her salvation. A volunteer teacher spotted her singing talent. A nun took her into town and bought her a parka and a guitar.

She was on her way.

By 16 she was in a bedsit in town paying her bills by working as a kissogram girl. By the time she got to London and a record company she was so punk, so feminist, when the record producers demanded she be more ‘girly’, she walked across the road and had her head shaved.

Sinéad O'Connor during her appearance at an all-star tribute to the music of Bob Dylan in October 1992 at Madison Square Garden where she was booed by the audience. Photo: Maria Bastone/AFP via Getty

When she got pregnant an abortion was robustly refused, a 21-year-old Sinéad giving an electric performance on a massive American stage, a baby gro hanging from her jeans.

While we second wave feminists did our revolution in jeans and jumpers and curly hair, Sinéad leapt into the limelight shaven-headed, in slashed jeans and bovver boots, a Public Enemy tattoo burned into her skull. This was to be a revolution with attitude.

America, at first entranced with this astonishing iteration of Irish womanhood turned, viciously, against her after she tore up a photo of the Pope, refused a Grammy and declined to perform at an event where the American National Anthem kicked off proceedings. Grown men got out their big machines and drove over her CDs. Her songs were pulled from the radio. The wave of hatred washing up to her in Madison Square is still shocking to behold.

Some context for all those now praising her here, busy trying to shove the ‘bad old days’ into the past. 

When Sinéad was on ‘Saturday Night Live’, here in Ireland the High Court was forcing the parents of a 14-year-old child, raped and impregnated by a ‘friend’ in whose care they had left her while they went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, to bring her home from London, where they were trying to get a DNA sample to prove paternity.

Dr Moira Woods, a founding member of the Women’s Movement, and GP to the family, led the public outrage which forced a reversal. The family ‘friend’ had a 14-year sentence reduced to four. On release, he kidnapped and raped a 15-year-old.

That same year Christine Buckley, survivor of a Catholic orphanage run by nuns, told us of little babies strapped onto potties for so long their little anuses prolapsed.

No. Oh yes.

Sinead O'Connor ripping up a photo of the Pope in 1992.

And Annie Murphy revealed she had a son with Bishop Eamon Casey. The same Bishop who’d romanced the Pope on his visit to Galway? That Sinéad was ripping into over child abuse? The very same.

Those denouncing Sinéad for flagging up the Vatican’s involvement in child abuse were vociferous. A priest rape a child, are you mad?

A child herself of everything that was damaged in repressed, religious Ireland she embodied the ferocity of an avenging angel. Dousing her arrows in petrol she let them fly straight from her soul.

Oh yes, fight the real enemy indeed.

The child of an Ireland when "the men could all beat the head off each other, but women weren’t even allowed to be angry", like the Virgin Mary, memorably played by Sinéad as a cig-smoking, pottymouthed hologram in a potato field in Patrick McCabe’s ‘Butcher Boy’, Irish women had, for decades, been stripped of their power, their rage, by our Taliban — the Catholic Church.

So many in these past days have said they hope Sinéad knows how loved she was. To be honest I’d say she knew only too well how despised she was. 

Mocked for her breakdowns. Mocked for her relationships. Mocked for her activism, her religiosity, her conversion to priest, to Islam. Mocked for her different children with different men. Mocked for being a woman who stood up to men. Who did she think she was?

She was not easy to live with. Brutally traumatised, she lived not just with her wounds, but in them. Her passion, her extraordinary capacity to strip a song down to its bones, rebuild it and return it to us dressed in the clothes of a shining archangel, is what we all loved her for. That haunting, fearsome beauty that has filled the airwaves since Wednesday.

"Live with the Devil long enough," she wrote in her 2021 autobiography ‘Rememberings’, "and you’ll find God".

Here’s hoping she has.

Rest in power lil’ sister.