‘She trembled with the truths she had to tell’: Sinéad O’Connor by friends, fans and collaborators
Anne Enright, author
Sinéad O’Connor was a daughter, a mother and a sister, she made a family that brought many people into its extended web of care, one that included the fathers of her four adored children. So when the world mourns an iconic talent and a great star, people in Dublin think about those caught up in her astonishing life story who are now bereaved. All these people joined in the battle for Sinéad’s mental health and worked for the protection and wellbeing of her children, and all of them, including Sinéad, contended with the distorting power that fame brought to her life. It was not easy. Somewhere in there, beyond the huge talent and huge difficulty, beyond public adoration and vilification, the ardent and anguished connection she felt with her fans, was the hope that her great heart and searching wit would bring her through. She was very beautiful and very wild, and she trembled with the truths she had to tell. Sinéad’s grief at the loss of her son was hard to witness and her loss will spark difficulties in many people. Before we turn her into a rock’n’roll saint and lift her image even further from the real, let’s check in with each other and lift the sadness where we can. There was none like her. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam dílis (May her faithful soul be at the right hand of God).
Neil Jordan, film director
I was walking with my granddaughter towards Dalkey, and played her a track Sinéad had just sent me, called No Veteran Dies Alone [from a planned new album of the same name]. It was one of the most extraordinary uses of her searing voice and her blazing lyrical talent. I told Sinéad when she first played it that if she wanted to make a video, I would be immediately available. The song was, or seemed to be, about how any cry of pain, for help, for understanding, can be so easily misinterpreted. She told me record companies wouldn’t be interested in funding a video for her, which I found odd, sad, or maybe just reflected how out of date I was. Anyway, the sound was echoing from my phone, and I turned a corner and there she was, sitting in the garden of the small pink bungalow she had rented. Head covered in an untidy headscarf, sitting on a bench in her nightgown. Of course, she was a Muslim now. Smoking away, drinking a coffee. It was beautiful to sit there for a while, while tourists ambled by, none of them having any idea who she was.
She seemed happy, at last. I had known her on and off since the 80s, relished a friendship with her that thankfully never went offside. She was always devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly provocative, a combination that some found hard to deal with. When I had to cast an actor for the Virgin Mary in my film The Butcher Boy I thought first of dragging Marilyn Monroe somehow back from the dead – a young kid in the Irish 50s could easily have confused those icons – and then had the much more interesting idea of asking Sinéad to play the role. She said yes immediately, having recently been ordained as some version of a Catholic priest and played the role in the Blessed Virgin Mary gown with a beautiful, mesmeric simplicity. Her face immediately fell into that statuesque grace any Irish child would have remembered, framed by the veil of Prussian blue. “Ah Francie, for fuck’s sake …”
I was godfather to her youngest son, Yeshua, and did my best, as did Yeshua’s father Frank, to help with the troubles of his older brother Shane. His tragic death 18 months ago would have put a splinter of ice in anybody’s heart, let alone a mother’s. Sinéad had kept in touch, through spells in hospitals and work with trauma victims in Detroit, but the greatest trauma was always her own. And now she had survived, had a little pink cottage and a bench and was still making extraordinary music out of her extraordinary troubles. She played me the latest mix of the song, and it went straight to the heart again with that voice that sounded straight out of a convent school in Dublin and kept on reverberating, dragging decades of pain with it. The first line: “There is one me, that nobody sees …”
She left that house and moved to Brixton. Sent me several emails, saying how glad she was to be out of “Direland”. She could always turn on a dime. Anyone who wants to understand her, and I’m sure that will now include most of the planet, should listen to [the currently unreleased] No Veteran Dies Alone. And I can only hope she was right.
Róisín Murphy, musician and fan
The world had never seen anything like her. I remember my first sight of
