The memories have come tumbling out. The little girl who played in a Dublin park. The teenager who sat on school steps strumming a guitar. The pop star who leaned out of a record company’s limousine in Washington DC to shout joyous insults at the Pentagon.
Ireland is remembering Sinéad O’Connor – and grasping what it has lost. For some people in Glenageary and Dún Laoghaire – the south Dublin suburbs where the singer grew up – the news of her death still had an air of unreality on Thursday.
For almost four decades O’Connor was a fixture, the local girl with a unique talent who was never far from controversy, and now at the age of 56 she was gone – found dead in a London flat on Wednesday.
“I was in bed when I heard the news. I nearly died,” said June Byrne, 60, seated in a cafe. “My sister knew her as a child when she had long blond hair. It’s very sad.”
Anna Whelan, 33, strolling with her family in summer sunshine, shook her head. “Just tragic. An incredible loss.” She had begun the day at home by playing Nothing Compares 2 U for her 10-month-old son Rory, who appeared to find it soothing.
Whelan’s husband, Marcel, 34, said he was just three years old in 1992 when O’Connor ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on US television and that the act of defiance and protest against clerical sexual abuse still resonated. “It took a lot of courage. She was standing up for something. As the first person to do it she took a lot of flak.”
Joe Falvey, who taught O’Connor at Newtown secondary school in Waterford in the 1980s, said the teenager played her guitar sitting on steps and benches. “I remember our first conversation outside of class, saying: ‘Whose song is that? I don’t recognise it,’ and she said: ‘That’s mine; I wrote it,’” he told RTÉ.
Falvey persuaded her to perform at a gig supporting another singer, Dominic Mulvany. The power and passion of her voice astonished the audience, he said. “It was the most memorable moment of my life. Everyone turned around. The power from this young girl. It was a shattering moment.”
Barry Egan, a writer for the Irish Independent, recalled uproarious excursions with O’Connor in London and the US. “She looked like an angel with a skinhead and talked like a punk Edna O’Brien on acid. She was the funniest woman I’d ever met.” The singer shouted obscenities from a stretch limo as it passed the Pentagon, he said.
Jim Sheridan, a former band director at The Late Late Show, recalled O’Connor improvising a performance of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ in 2010 to mark Ireland’s belated reckoning with clerical sexual abuse. “It was unplanned, unrehearsed and from the heart … just got up and sang her heart out.”
Others posted memories of acts of kindness. In 2017 she donated clothes to Transgender Equality Network Ireland. In 2020 she welcomed a couple who visited her home to buy a guitar. “She was very shy & lovely. She asked if we wanted her to sign the guitar. Of course we did.”
RIP Sinead. I never told this story publicly but I met her in 2020 when we went over to her house & bought a guitar from her. She was very shy & lovely. She asked if we want her to sign the guitar. Of course we did. It’s the guitar from her I’m not bossy, I’m the boss album cover pic.twitter.com/IihJAgMVXi
— Andreeeeeeeeaaaaaa! (@brandalisms) July 26, 2023
The actor Russell Crowe recalled sitting outside a pub in Dalkey, south Dublin, last year when a woman in a puffy jacket and scarf walked past. A colleague recognised her and brought her over. “She looked in my eyes, and uttered with disarming softness: ‘Oh, it’s you Russell.’”
O’Connor ordered tea and they discussed Irish and American politics, the struggle for Indigenous rights, especially in Australia, her warm memory of New Zealand, faith, music, films and her novelist brother Joseph O’Connor, Crowe tweeted. “When her second cup was taking on the night air, she rose, embraced us all and strode away into the fog-dimmed streetlights.”
