I'm not sure that there are larger cultural issues intertwined with Sinead and her life, other than, perhaps, the obvious: the working class, and in particular the Irish working class is rife with pathologies.
Trauma begets trauma, and the Irish were an occupied people for, what, 500 years.
I'm an almost exact contemporary of O'Connor, and I'd say that her troubles were evident from at or near the beginning - certainly, although her voice was a thing of beauty, it always conveyed pain.
Once she began doing the bizarre for the sake of being bizarre and getting attention, it was obvious that anyone in her personal orbit would suffer - Sinead was not unique, as these people are everywhere in the working class world, being destroyed psychologically, and then destroying others in turn. Sinead's difference was only in that her madness was public spectacle.
Sinead was essentially the Catholic Cassandra of the turn of the century. On that basis and for the suffering and psychological toll she endured for reproaching the Church for its corruption and abuses, she deserves a sainthood. She was God's scourge, deranged, broken, imperfect but still served a divine purpose.
This is a beautiful, searingly honest tribute to a person I didn't know a lot about, outside of the occasional media moments that O'Connor seemed to court throughout her life. I have her memoirs (I have a habit of buying and reading auto/biographies of musicians and people I know little about) but had felt somewhat disinclined to read hers until now. Even hearing about her death didn't seem to give me the push to want to do so. But this essay of yours was featured on Josh Slocum's 'Disaffected' podcast and after hearing him cover a portion of your writing, I came here to read your entire essay for myself. I'm incredibly impressed with how well balanced this piece is and thanks to you I think I'm now ready to read O'Connor's memoirs for myself.
I always knew that you had a flair for both the polemic and the personal (having especially enjoyed watching you and Sargon talk, during your 'Milleniyule' content over the years) but this piece today elevated your voice especially well. Thank you for writing this and getting me to put aside my personal disdain for O'Connor's behaviour over the years. And thank you for giving her a beautiful yet unflinchingly honest obituary.
Will do. I'm currently reading a biography of Elliott Smith, but I've got hers cued up at the top of my list on my Kindle TBR, ready to be my next read.
Would have been a great essay but for the Catholic-bashing (BTW, the clerical abuse problem is a problem centered on homosexual ephebophilia, not heterosexual pedophilia. And sexual abuse is 100X worse in American public schools than it ever was in the Church. See http://tinyurl.com/yxcfbgn4 and read the two reports there. Nothing excuses the shuffling around of abusive priests, but the problem shouldn't be exaggerated, should be understood for what it actually is (was?), and shouldn't lead to the fallacy that Catholic teaching isn't true because bad administrators did or allowed great evils).
Anyway, poor Sinead. All those years of emotional torment! I so hope that she didn't kill herself. And I so hope that if she had she is forgiven. And I so hope she has found peace at last. Very sad...
I don't think that was "Catholic bashing" - just noting that a way of life had become corrupt and rotten. It's not that I *want* this to be the case; I just think it *is* the case.
The bashing wasn't the mention of corruption (which, as a Catholic, of the trad variety, I know full well is there; Pope Francis is THE worst of the worst); it was this sort of reference: "classic type of bullying associated with the Catholic Church - 'you are evil', 'you must repent', etc. '" We're all sinners, and all 'fall short." Reminding people of that once in a while isn't "bullying"; it's basic Christian soteriology, a soteriology that you won't find a lot of in Novus Ordo parishes anyway, Novus Ordo parishes being where post-conciliar priests skip over things like sin, Hell, and all that sort of thing that educated Catholics have always believed in. And Catholics aren't Calvinists with their "total depravity" stuff. We believe actual grace and the moral virtues can be found in lots of places.
Anyway, carry on with your fine self, Mr. Woes! You do the world a lot of good!
Wow! I am blown away by the beauty and brilliance of this essay, by the delicacy and depth you display in dissecting the social tidal waves that pummeled this quirky, frail, imperfect shoot of a woman, whose "Nothing compares to U" from 1990 still rings in my head with perfection, evoking timeless love and longing.
Sad thing is that Ireland and counties across Westernized world have more child abuse via transgenderism, prostitution and surrogacy and all else the techno feudal religious corporation encapsulated over the last 10 years, and Sinead hasn't been able to figure it out.
It's on the middle aged fans of hers to do it. They keep thinking the Catholic church is the worst. Yet, reality shows abuse of children across the political divide.
Ah, ok. Thanks. I found this publication by searching reactions to Sinead's death on Substack and it is one of the better ones. Members of the woke church, not only in Ireland but across the world say Sinead is "theirs" and it's so sad to watch how they are making an idol of her life and career. Also, it started before her death with that damned movie in which they claim she "inspired" the other singers. It's all a boring fabrication.
I hated the movie. Her book is also highly produced by a professional in the business. The nice thing about the book is she actually read it herself. Thanks again.
I dont t hink so, I lived in Dublin from birth until age 25 or so, but if I crossed paths with her it mustve been before she shaved her head and acquired fame.
MWs tribute to her here is really the only one I've seen that mixes compassion, respect for her art and insight into her medical/psychological issues without getting bogged down in her (perhaps tiresome) politics. Great job MW
MW's piece is a smear job which avoids the most important facts in Sinead's life. I see no tribute whatsoever. It is bitchcraft to miss out the impact of psych drugs and a hysterectomy.
The essay is not a smear job. It does not avoid the most important facts from her life. There is ample tribute to her talents and to her spirit.
The truth is we have no idea how psychiatric drugs altered her thinking, or whether they did at all. You are assuming they did, and then asserting that as the most important fact of her life, then using that to condemn my essay wholesale. Either demonstrate that you are able and willing to be more reasonable, or I will ban you from here so that you cannot waste any more of my time.
You assumed that Sinead was mentally ill and based your entire essay on that assumption. I have pointed out, politely that you neglected to mention (or did not know) that Sinead O'Connor was often heard complaining that she had been misdiagnosed and the psychiatric treatment she received caused terrible side effects like weight gain and brain fog. When she was given a hysterectomy, further psychological distress followed.
Oh well have it your way, I'm not sure why you read him so.
Sinead was famously anti drugs by the way- she dobbed in Shane McGowan to the Garda and walked out on Anthony Kiedis (singer of RHCPs) upon seeing his heroin gear.
And she had 4 kids, unusually high for an Irishwoman of her generation, so not sure why a later hysterectomy would be so important or awful.
ha ha well 'psych drugs' could mean psychiatric drugs (legal in correct situations) or psychedelic drugs (almost always illegal) so I wasnt sure which you were referring to.
But I dont think you're arguing in good faith, merely being a gadfly, so I'll leave it there
You seem to have issues of your own possibly not unlike Sinead's
Terrific piece, Woes; lucent with nuanced psychological insight, and shot through with a sense of fairness and justice towards its subject with all her vices and virtues. A blunt observation if I may: would there have been so much clamour around O'Connor's death had she not been beautiful? This is not the trivial question it might sound. We are naturally in awe of good-looking people because they are the extreme exception (the vast majority of us are so soul-crushingly plain, hence the obsession with physical beauty!) Indeed, ally beauty with talent and you have a very dangerous force to be reckoned with.
In this context O'Connor had that seductive, wide-eyed look of the vulnerable waif, almost a spiritual quality of fragility, a beauty we all wish to protect in this brutal world. I think she played on that to a degree, despite the deliberate 'uglification' of the shaven hair that you so articulately analyse. I don't think her talent as a composer was anything other than uneven: when she was good she was absolutely brilliant ('Three Babies' I find almost unbearably moving); but when she was average she was very, very forgettable. Yes, her voice was bewitching but it wasn't unique in any way - there are, and have been, very many chanteuses with equal or superior vocal talents.
All this makes me sound a little unkind about Sinead, and I don't mean to be - though very rarely a musical genius she was genuinely touched by real artistic talent. In this context I would wish merely to side with those such as yourself who seek to articulate some thoughts and emotions about her that humbly aspire to greater depth and illumination than the mawkish and downright inaccurate outpourings of sentiment about her over the past week or two.
I especially appreciated your analysis of the left's theft and ultimate abuse of her late, personal epiphany for their own ideological ends - a typically disgusting piece of moral larceny. Lord, how one loathes the process by which the leftist 'borg' dehumanises human experience.
As regards her own politics: it was perhaps predictable, given her mental decay in latter years, that she should behave with increasingly deranged bitterness towards her own people. Her calls for the hugely admirable John Waters - an Irish freedom fighter if ever there was one - to be arrested were nothing short of contemptible at best and downright wicked at worst. But perhaps in even making mention of this incident I dwell on it too much. John himself was, I note, typically gentle and elegant in his own brief reference to Sinead's death recently.
Anyway, thanks again for a really superior piece of writing expressive of much needed insight into this subject and the tragic woman whose very sad life inspired and provoked it.
Very good point about John Waters. He is an incredibly courageous and good-hearted man. I felt hugely disappointed, but not surprised, when I read about O’Connor’s comments. But she really couldn’t help herself in many ways...
Very true. Well, John's daughter (with Sinead) has apparently manifested a vivid talent for poetry, and that is obviously a tremendous and much-deserved source of delight for him as a father and a man.
Indeed. He deserves all the good things that come his way. He and Gemma O’Doherty are among the brave few, to be taking a public stance against the dreadful, oppressive regime in Ireland. If the proposed Hate Speech legislation passes, they will be silenced.
Again, very true; though sadly in recent months Gemma appears to have disappeared down an unfortunate dead-end (ideologically speaking), from which it would appear (citing her own observation) John has chosen to distance himself.
"BPD often stems from a woman’s relationship with her father. A weak or overly-doting father seems to be relevant to the condition, but also an absent or distant father. All of these descriptions mean that the father cannot impose order on his daughter, and some of them seem to fit Sinéad’s father, Seán."
This gets it precisely backwards; BPD is classically passed from mother to daughter, through relentless, inescapable love-hate abuse of the kind so vividly described here. It's true that an absent or weak father unable to shield his daughter from her mother enables this situation, but it blames precisely the wrong party, particularly when, as here, the father was valiantly and futilely fighting a rigged system for custody, while working to support not just himself but his broken family for years of her childhood and adolescence.
Very good text. Very nuanced. Yes, Sinéad was completely nuts. But I really loved her during her prime (1987-1997). Some of her tracks, like this version of Danny Boy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYN5iAMHukA), are performed with such unadorned grace and frailty ; her voice was a terrible beauty. But yes, she had done too many insane things to ever be redeemed. For me, it was running around with a Islamic veil, while right before that, going on TV with a bunch of awful tatoos saying how she needed to get laid. She should have just sang, but she was as famous as much for her controversial opinions and shaved head as she was for Nothing Compares 2U. As a singer, she holds a special place in my heart.
The amount of child abuse in the Catholic Church has been overstated by Jewish media and Hollywood.
There is far more child abuse in schools but it is rarely mentioned because the entire educational establishment is a vital cog in the woke left's machinery, from the communist bilge they brainwash children with to the financial support provided by teachers' Union dues.
As for sinead O'connor, she was no crazier than a lot of women. She just had an unusual talent which provided her a bigger platform to broadcast her insanity. She would have had a happier life, and done far less damage to others and to her society, if she'd spent it in that Magdalene Laundry.
Another excellent article! I knew very little about Sinead or her career, but I feel you offered me some deep understanding. In many ways her life seems very emblematic to our age, and as such a very good topic for discussion.
What appears glaring to me is the complete lack of HUMILITY in her behavior. I cannot help but wonder what her religious life was like given the incredibly selfish, arrogant, willful, proud demeanor that both her words and decisions reveal. I believe humility would have been the tonic, the missing piece, the 'miracle cure'.
Easier said than done of course. Complete lack of humility was likely the reason that made her impossible for the father to deal with, and what made her run from the education offered by the nuns. I'll bet they absolutely demanded she humble herself. I hope she learned to bend the knee before she met her Maker.
I'm a bit out of my depth here not being religious, but is it fair to say Islam is submission before God rather than people, where Buddishm requires humility to others?
True. Though the analysis depends on the angle of approach. Our ancestors would not have medicalized the phenomenon or used the modern terminology, but they certainly would have recognized her type. To them it would have been a morbid case of pridefulness and lack of humility.
Thankyou for this thoughtful article. I first saw SInead O'Connor on The Roxy, in 1988, ITV's version of Top Of The Pops. I didn't think much of her even back then. But I did recognise just how powerful her "Nothing Compares 2U" was.
Do you have any contemporaneous accounts about why O’Connor tore up the photo of the pope?
I was ~30 when it happened, and remembered it as a general condemnation of the Catholic Church, using its most famous (living) representative. While recent accounts link her actions to the cover up of sexually abusive priests, a 1992 account in the Washington Post merely refers to O’Connor’s protests about the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control, abortion, and divorce.
O’Connor’s wiki page says:
<<At the time, she did not mention the Roman Catholic Church as a culprit nor distinguished between forms of abuse but in January 1995, in an appearance on the British late-night television programme After Dark during an episode titled "Ireland: Sex & Celibacy, Church & State", she linked abuse in families to the Church saying that O’Connor linked familial abuse to the Catholic Church.>>
It’s not clear whether this referred to abusive priests or priests telling women to stay with
abusive husbands; unfortunately the cited article does not have a link.
Was O’Connor being prescient? This was, after all, a decade before the Boston Globe’s explosive reports on sexual abuse, and O’Connor was allegedly abused not by a priest but her mother. Was she truly trying to bring attention to predatory priests? If so, she certainly left everyone in the dark! It’s far more exculpatory if she was protesting issues that were common knowledge, such as priests urging battered wives to stay, along with their vulnerable children, with abusive husbands.
She was being prescient. Read my comment on the unmarked graves of 155 women, discovered one year after the SNL incident, in the grounds of one of the Magdalene Laundries. Other such gruesome discoveries were made - remains of dead babies etc. I grew up in Ireland in the 80s and 90s. It was an unspoken truth that unspeakable abuse had been occurring for decades. It is easy to despair of the dreadful state of Ireland now (the cult of woke is dreadful), but it is worth remembering that Catholic Ireland was a very far from perfect place....
But was she speaking specifically about predatory priests and the children they abused? Or the inhumane torture of the women imprisoned in the Magdalene Laundries. Or something else? I’m not arguing these things -and worsw--didn’t happen! Im not trying to defend the Catholic Churchx, or Catholics, or any of the popesI’m confused about what O’Connor knew at the time.
I think O’Connor was just full of rage at the pretty much everything. She was full of anger, but the focus of that anger was non-specific. I knew other young women then, who would rage endlessly at the fact that there was no abortion available anywhere on the island of Ireland. When I was at school, there was the high profile case of Ann Rose Lovett, a schoolgirl who died alone giving birth to a baby, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-ann-lovett-letters-sorrow-shame-anger-and-indignation-1.1673920 I remember the Lovett case well - it rocked Ireland and,arguably, was one of the beginnings of the end for the Church. The Catholic Church then would also advise battered wives to stay with their abusers. And then there’s the systemic child sex abuse...There was a fair bit to get angry about. Woke Ireland is a dreadful, but it’s worth remembering that Catholic Ireland was far from perfect.
I'm not sure that there are larger cultural issues intertwined with Sinead and her life, other than, perhaps, the obvious: the working class, and in particular the Irish working class is rife with pathologies.
Trauma begets trauma, and the Irish were an occupied people for, what, 500 years.
I'm an almost exact contemporary of O'Connor, and I'd say that her troubles were evident from at or near the beginning - certainly, although her voice was a thing of beauty, it always conveyed pain.
Once she began doing the bizarre for the sake of being bizarre and getting attention, it was obvious that anyone in her personal orbit would suffer - Sinead was not unique, as these people are everywhere in the working class world, being destroyed psychologically, and then destroying others in turn. Sinead's difference was only in that her madness was public spectacle.
Sinead was essentially the Catholic Cassandra of the turn of the century. On that basis and for the suffering and psychological toll she endured for reproaching the Church for its corruption and abuses, she deserves a sainthood. She was God's scourge, deranged, broken, imperfect but still served a divine purpose.
This is the kind of nuance take on a “problematic” celebrities death that legacy media outlets often fail at. Good Job, Woes
Thank you.
This is a beautiful, searingly honest tribute to a person I didn't know a lot about, outside of the occasional media moments that O'Connor seemed to court throughout her life. I have her memoirs (I have a habit of buying and reading auto/biographies of musicians and people I know little about) but had felt somewhat disinclined to read hers until now. Even hearing about her death didn't seem to give me the push to want to do so. But this essay of yours was featured on Josh Slocum's 'Disaffected' podcast and after hearing him cover a portion of your writing, I came here to read your entire essay for myself. I'm incredibly impressed with how well balanced this piece is and thanks to you I think I'm now ready to read O'Connor's memoirs for myself.
I always knew that you had a flair for both the polemic and the personal (having especially enjoyed watching you and Sargon talk, during your 'Milleniyule' content over the years) but this piece today elevated your voice especially well. Thank you for writing this and getting me to put aside my personal disdain for O'Connor's behaviour over the years. And thank you for giving her a beautiful yet unflinchingly honest obituary.
Bex
Thank you for these kind comments, Bex. If you do read her autobiography, please let me know what you think of it.
Will do. I'm currently reading a biography of Elliott Smith, but I've got hers cued up at the top of my list on my Kindle TBR, ready to be my next read.
Well Woes... You are becoming a hell of a writer. Deeply touching, this.
Thank you.
Would have been a great essay but for the Catholic-bashing (BTW, the clerical abuse problem is a problem centered on homosexual ephebophilia, not heterosexual pedophilia. And sexual abuse is 100X worse in American public schools than it ever was in the Church. See http://tinyurl.com/yxcfbgn4 and read the two reports there. Nothing excuses the shuffling around of abusive priests, but the problem shouldn't be exaggerated, should be understood for what it actually is (was?), and shouldn't lead to the fallacy that Catholic teaching isn't true because bad administrators did or allowed great evils).
Anyway, poor Sinead. All those years of emotional torment! I so hope that she didn't kill herself. And I so hope that if she had she is forgiven. And I so hope she has found peace at last. Very sad...
I don't think that was "Catholic bashing" - just noting that a way of life had become corrupt and rotten. It's not that I *want* this to be the case; I just think it *is* the case.
The bashing wasn't the mention of corruption (which, as a Catholic, of the trad variety, I know full well is there; Pope Francis is THE worst of the worst); it was this sort of reference: "classic type of bullying associated with the Catholic Church - 'you are evil', 'you must repent', etc. '" We're all sinners, and all 'fall short." Reminding people of that once in a while isn't "bullying"; it's basic Christian soteriology, a soteriology that you won't find a lot of in Novus Ordo parishes anyway, Novus Ordo parishes being where post-conciliar priests skip over things like sin, Hell, and all that sort of thing that educated Catholics have always believed in. And Catholics aren't Calvinists with their "total depravity" stuff. We believe actual grace and the moral virtues can be found in lots of places.
Anyway, carry on with your fine self, Mr. Woes! You do the world a lot of good!
Thank you. Maybe "cliched" would have been a better word than "classic".
Wow! I am blown away by the beauty and brilliance of this essay, by the delicacy and depth you display in dissecting the social tidal waves that pummeled this quirky, frail, imperfect shoot of a woman, whose "Nothing compares to U" from 1990 still rings in my head with perfection, evoking timeless love and longing.
Sad thing is that Ireland and counties across Westernized world have more child abuse via transgenderism, prostitution and surrogacy and all else the techno feudal religious corporation encapsulated over the last 10 years, and Sinead hasn't been able to figure it out.
It's on the middle aged fans of hers to do it. They keep thinking the Catholic church is the worst. Yet, reality shows abuse of children across the political divide.
Yes, it seems to be a case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" for Ireland.
Are you responding to me.
Yes.
Ah, ok. Thanks. I found this publication by searching reactions to Sinead's death on Substack and it is one of the better ones. Members of the woke church, not only in Ireland but across the world say Sinead is "theirs" and it's so sad to watch how they are making an idol of her life and career. Also, it started before her death with that damned movie in which they claim she "inspired" the other singers. It's all a boring fabrication.
I hated the movie. Her book is also highly produced by a professional in the business. The nice thing about the book is she actually read it herself. Thanks again.
The link to the live stream of the funeral, right today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncqosZjNmt0
It's disgusting how they've covered her in LGBT and trans flag... it's just insane and insulting.
And the fucking Ireland's president was supposedly there! Just no.
tremendous article and really accurate on her mental health problems which were definitely at the severe end of the spectrum
Definitely? Did you ever meet Sinead?
I dont t hink so, I lived in Dublin from birth until age 25 or so, but if I crossed paths with her it mustve been before she shaved her head and acquired fame.
MWs tribute to her here is really the only one I've seen that mixes compassion, respect for her art and insight into her medical/psychological issues without getting bogged down in her (perhaps tiresome) politics. Great job MW
MW's piece is a smear job which avoids the most important facts in Sinead's life. I see no tribute whatsoever. It is bitchcraft to miss out the impact of psych drugs and a hysterectomy.
The essay is not a smear job. It does not avoid the most important facts from her life. There is ample tribute to her talents and to her spirit.
The truth is we have no idea how psychiatric drugs altered her thinking, or whether they did at all. You are assuming they did, and then asserting that as the most important fact of her life, then using that to condemn my essay wholesale. Either demonstrate that you are able and willing to be more reasonable, or I will ban you from here so that you cannot waste any more of my time.
You assumed that Sinead was mentally ill and based your entire essay on that assumption. I have pointed out, politely that you neglected to mention (or did not know) that Sinead O'Connor was often heard complaining that she had been misdiagnosed and the psychiatric treatment she received caused terrible side effects like weight gain and brain fog. When she was given a hysterectomy, further psychological distress followed.
She was not crazy.
She was being SILENCED.
Oh well have it your way, I'm not sure why you read him so.
Sinead was famously anti drugs by the way- she dobbed in Shane McGowan to the Garda and walked out on Anthony Kiedis (singer of RHCPs) upon seeing his heroin gear.
And she had 4 kids, unusually high for an Irishwoman of her generation, so not sure why a later hysterectomy would be so important or awful.
My goodness! I squirmed with shock at your astonishing ignorance.
Psych drugs, Ciaran, are not street drugs.
A hysterectomy can be physically destructive to a woman.
Only a man could belittle its impact.
ha ha well 'psych drugs' could mean psychiatric drugs (legal in correct situations) or psychedelic drugs (almost always illegal) so I wasnt sure which you were referring to.
But I dont think you're arguing in good faith, merely being a gadfly, so I'll leave it there
You seem to have issues of your own possibly not unlike Sinead's
Thank you.
Terrific piece, Woes; lucent with nuanced psychological insight, and shot through with a sense of fairness and justice towards its subject with all her vices and virtues. A blunt observation if I may: would there have been so much clamour around O'Connor's death had she not been beautiful? This is not the trivial question it might sound. We are naturally in awe of good-looking people because they are the extreme exception (the vast majority of us are so soul-crushingly plain, hence the obsession with physical beauty!) Indeed, ally beauty with talent and you have a very dangerous force to be reckoned with.
In this context O'Connor had that seductive, wide-eyed look of the vulnerable waif, almost a spiritual quality of fragility, a beauty we all wish to protect in this brutal world. I think she played on that to a degree, despite the deliberate 'uglification' of the shaven hair that you so articulately analyse. I don't think her talent as a composer was anything other than uneven: when she was good she was absolutely brilliant ('Three Babies' I find almost unbearably moving); but when she was average she was very, very forgettable. Yes, her voice was bewitching but it wasn't unique in any way - there are, and have been, very many chanteuses with equal or superior vocal talents.
All this makes me sound a little unkind about Sinead, and I don't mean to be - though very rarely a musical genius she was genuinely touched by real artistic talent. In this context I would wish merely to side with those such as yourself who seek to articulate some thoughts and emotions about her that humbly aspire to greater depth and illumination than the mawkish and downright inaccurate outpourings of sentiment about her over the past week or two.
I especially appreciated your analysis of the left's theft and ultimate abuse of her late, personal epiphany for their own ideological ends - a typically disgusting piece of moral larceny. Lord, how one loathes the process by which the leftist 'borg' dehumanises human experience.
As regards her own politics: it was perhaps predictable, given her mental decay in latter years, that she should behave with increasingly deranged bitterness towards her own people. Her calls for the hugely admirable John Waters - an Irish freedom fighter if ever there was one - to be arrested were nothing short of contemptible at best and downright wicked at worst. But perhaps in even making mention of this incident I dwell on it too much. John himself was, I note, typically gentle and elegant in his own brief reference to Sinead's death recently.
Anyway, thanks again for a really superior piece of writing expressive of much needed insight into this subject and the tragic woman whose very sad life inspired and provoked it.
Very good point about John Waters. He is an incredibly courageous and good-hearted man. I felt hugely disappointed, but not surprised, when I read about O’Connor’s comments. But she really couldn’t help herself in many ways...
Very true. Well, John's daughter (with Sinead) has apparently manifested a vivid talent for poetry, and that is obviously a tremendous and much-deserved source of delight for him as a father and a man.
Indeed. He deserves all the good things that come his way. He and Gemma O’Doherty are among the brave few, to be taking a public stance against the dreadful, oppressive regime in Ireland. If the proposed Hate Speech legislation passes, they will be silenced.
Again, very true; though sadly in recent months Gemma appears to have disappeared down an unfortunate dead-end (ideologically speaking), from which it would appear (citing her own observation) John has chosen to distance himself.
"BPD often stems from a woman’s relationship with her father. A weak or overly-doting father seems to be relevant to the condition, but also an absent or distant father. All of these descriptions mean that the father cannot impose order on his daughter, and some of them seem to fit Sinéad’s father, Seán."
This gets it precisely backwards; BPD is classically passed from mother to daughter, through relentless, inescapable love-hate abuse of the kind so vividly described here. It's true that an absent or weak father unable to shield his daughter from her mother enables this situation, but it blames precisely the wrong party, particularly when, as here, the father was valiantly and futilely fighting a rigged system for custody, while working to support not just himself but his broken family for years of her childhood and adolescence.
Very good text. Very nuanced. Yes, Sinéad was completely nuts. But I really loved her during her prime (1987-1997). Some of her tracks, like this version of Danny Boy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYN5iAMHukA), are performed with such unadorned grace and frailty ; her voice was a terrible beauty. But yes, she had done too many insane things to ever be redeemed. For me, it was running around with a Islamic veil, while right before that, going on TV with a bunch of awful tatoos saying how she needed to get laid. She should have just sang, but she was as famous as much for her controversial opinions and shaved head as she was for Nothing Compares 2U. As a singer, she holds a special place in my heart.
The amount of child abuse in the Catholic Church has been overstated by Jewish media and Hollywood.
There is far more child abuse in schools but it is rarely mentioned because the entire educational establishment is a vital cog in the woke left's machinery, from the communist bilge they brainwash children with to the financial support provided by teachers' Union dues.
As for sinead O'connor, she was no crazier than a lot of women. She just had an unusual talent which provided her a bigger platform to broadcast her insanity. She would have had a happier life, and done far less damage to others and to her society, if she'd spent it in that Magdalene Laundry.
Another excellent article! I knew very little about Sinead or her career, but I feel you offered me some deep understanding. In many ways her life seems very emblematic to our age, and as such a very good topic for discussion.
What appears glaring to me is the complete lack of HUMILITY in her behavior. I cannot help but wonder what her religious life was like given the incredibly selfish, arrogant, willful, proud demeanor that both her words and decisions reveal. I believe humility would have been the tonic, the missing piece, the 'miracle cure'.
Easier said than done of course. Complete lack of humility was likely the reason that made her impossible for the father to deal with, and what made her run from the education offered by the nuns. I'll bet they absolutely demanded she humble herself. I hope she learned to bend the knee before she met her Maker.
interesting that she was attracted to Islam rather than Buddhism which of course is far bigger on humility
In principle, and in literal terms, islam is all about Submission before God.
I'm a bit out of my depth here not being religious, but is it fair to say Islam is submission before God rather than people, where Buddishm requires humility to others?
I think, to understand her lack of humility, you have to look at the BPD. A BPD sufferer cannot admit they are wrong, ever.
True. Though the analysis depends on the angle of approach. Our ancestors would not have medicalized the phenomenon or used the modern terminology, but they certainly would have recognized her type. To them it would have been a morbid case of pridefulness and lack of humility.
Thankyou for this thoughtful article. I first saw SInead O'Connor on The Roxy, in 1988, ITV's version of Top Of The Pops. I didn't think much of her even back then. But I did recognise just how powerful her "Nothing Compares 2U" was.
Do you have any contemporaneous accounts about why O’Connor tore up the photo of the pope?
I was ~30 when it happened, and remembered it as a general condemnation of the Catholic Church, using its most famous (living) representative. While recent accounts link her actions to the cover up of sexually abusive priests, a 1992 account in the Washington Post merely refers to O’Connor’s protests about the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control, abortion, and divorce.
O’Connor’s wiki page says:
<<At the time, she did not mention the Roman Catholic Church as a culprit nor distinguished between forms of abuse but in January 1995, in an appearance on the British late-night television programme After Dark during an episode titled "Ireland: Sex & Celibacy, Church & State", she linked abuse in families to the Church saying that O’Connor linked familial abuse to the Catholic Church.>>
It’s not clear whether this referred to abusive priests or priests telling women to stay with
abusive husbands; unfortunately the cited article does not have a link.
Was O’Connor being prescient? This was, after all, a decade before the Boston Globe’s explosive reports on sexual abuse, and O’Connor was allegedly abused not by a priest but her mother. Was she truly trying to bring attention to predatory priests? If so, she certainly left everyone in the dark! It’s far more exculpatory if she was protesting issues that were common knowledge, such as priests urging battered wives to stay, along with their vulnerable children, with abusive husbands.
She was being prescient. Read my comment on the unmarked graves of 155 women, discovered one year after the SNL incident, in the grounds of one of the Magdalene Laundries. Other such gruesome discoveries were made - remains of dead babies etc. I grew up in Ireland in the 80s and 90s. It was an unspoken truth that unspeakable abuse had been occurring for decades. It is easy to despair of the dreadful state of Ireland now (the cult of woke is dreadful), but it is worth remembering that Catholic Ireland was a very far from perfect place....
But was she speaking specifically about predatory priests and the children they abused? Or the inhumane torture of the women imprisoned in the Magdalene Laundries. Or something else? I’m not arguing these things -and worsw--didn’t happen! Im not trying to defend the Catholic Churchx, or Catholics, or any of the popesI’m confused about what O’Connor knew at the time.
I think O’Connor was just full of rage at the pretty much everything. She was full of anger, but the focus of that anger was non-specific. I knew other young women then, who would rage endlessly at the fact that there was no abortion available anywhere on the island of Ireland. When I was at school, there was the high profile case of Ann Rose Lovett, a schoolgirl who died alone giving birth to a baby, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-ann-lovett-letters-sorrow-shame-anger-and-indignation-1.1673920 I remember the Lovett case well - it rocked Ireland and,arguably, was one of the beginnings of the end for the Church. The Catholic Church then would also advise battered wives to stay with their abusers. And then there’s the systemic child sex abuse...There was a fair bit to get angry about. Woke Ireland is a dreadful, but it’s worth remembering that Catholic Ireland was far from perfect.