I think it’s difficult for us in North America to appreciate how contrary, rebellious, and frankly prophetic Sinéad O’Connor was in an Irish context. I lived there briefly in 1985, and so saw a bit of the place and time she was from.
It was a bit of a culture shock. I was 19 and not in school. I got a work permit and flew over to Dublin. I only spoke English at the time so it was kind of a toss up between London and Dublin. I didn’t think there’d be much of a difference it was all “Western Europe” as far as I was concerned — Denmark, France, Ireland, … all pretty similar right? Hahahaha.
Unlike today, Ireland in 1985 was a poor country. Deprivation had forced generations of people to emigrate to seek a better life. There were 4 million people in the Republic, but in 1845 there had been 8 million. The only country in Europe whose population declined over that period. 1995 was the first time in 300 years Ireland did not have negative net migration.
And it was pious. Sinéad called it “a theocracy”. There were no state schools. All education was in the hands of religious schools — overwhelmingly Catholic. Two years before, in 1983, the Republic had put a ban on abortion into their constitution. Condoms were illegal when I got there. In 1980 Bob Geldof had summed up his home town as “police and priests”.
It seemed a bit more patriarchal than the US in the Reagan years. But I didn’t know the half of it. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the Magdalene Laundries where “troubled” girls were imprisoned in workhouses operated by orders of nuns, the Mother and Baby homes where women who were pregnant out of wedlock were kept out of sight to have their babies in secret, who were then taken from them and sold to American Catholic couples — and underneath it all the decades-long, quietly suppressed crime of the clergy sexually abusing boys and girls.
This stuff was not talked about in 1980s Ireland. But Sinéad did. She would not shut up. She would not stay in her place. She made original, passionate music. But if you think she caused an uproar in the US when she tore up a photo of the Pope on SNL in 1992 … well, in Ireland it was more of what she already was known for.
It was only later, in the late 1990 and 2000s that the scandals broke, and everyone could see that the crazy woman who would not shut up was right. She had been right all along.
The 2022 biographical film Nothing Compares is good. If you want to get the flavor of what she means to people in Ireland, go scroll through the expressions of grief pouring out on mastodon.ie
