![]() They would collect money in charity boxes, then Marie, who was killed in a car crash when Sinéad was 18, would steal all the donations – sometimes as much as £200 a night. Marie was a kleptomaniac who forced her daughter to steal for her. She compared the Ireland she grew up in to Iran: “a theocracy, slightly less potent but the same situation.”Īnd again she talked about her mother. It was beautiful – elliptical, poetic, gorgeous sentences scattered among the debris of her life. Sinéad had written a memoir of sorts called Rememberings. She was at home in Wicklow, sat by a pipe that remorselessly drip-dripped as day turned to night. In 2021, we talked for hours during lockdown on Zoom. And within a day of taking the medication, I felt the cement had come and filled in the hole.” I felt like I was walking round the world with a huge fucking hole in me. She asked if I’d ever seen a cowboy movie where the guy is shot from behind and a huge hole is blown through his back: “That’s how I used to feel. She also talked about her bipolar diagnosis and how medication had helped. Sinéad had converted to Islam, changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat, but was still chain-smoking and potty mouthed She told me she’d won a prize at school for rolling into the smallest ball and that the reason she could do it was because she was so used to having the shit kicked out of her by her mother. That day she talked about her mother’s abuse – physical and sexual. It was just something private between me and the Holy Spirit.” “No,” she said, “I didn’t do it to cause offence. I asked if she’d been ordained to stick two fingers up at the Catholic hierarchy. Despite everything she still had her faith. Eighteen years after tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as a protest at abuse in the church, she’d been vindicated. We were talking because Pope Benedict XVI had just issued an apology to the victims of decades of sex abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. She had the air of a mid 20th-century industrialist. She had become a priest, her face was rounder and she wore a tweed suit. The first time we met was in Bray, just outside Dublin, in 2010. Sinéad O’Connor performing on British TV show The Roxy in June 1987. The picture seemed full of hope and uncertainty. A few weeks ago he was clearing his house, preparing to move, and he came across a picture of them when they were a couple. My friend John went out with her when they were in their twenties. The thing you always had to question was whether she was in a fit state to be interviewed or whether it might be exploitative. ![]() “We alone get to call it the nuthouse – the patients.” I’ve been practically living there for six years.” She stressed that it was her privilege to call it that, not mine. “I’ve spent most of the time in the nuthouse. She reclaimed the politically incorrect and unsayable, and spat out the words joyously. ![]() But Sinéad, who died on Wednesday aged 56, would never call it that. Last time I interviewed her, in 2021, she told me she’d been in a psychiatric hospital for the best part of six years. ![]()
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