Look Back On Anger

It’s a beautiful balmy May afternoon in Galway city, only occasionally dampened by mild Atlantic squalls blowing in off the bay, and Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor is having a good day.

So good, in fact, that the diminutive and distinctively shaven-headed singer is considering cancelling a psychiatric appointment in London tomorrow morning, and spending another leisurely evening chilling out in the west.
“God, I really don’t fancy heading back home tonight and then getting up at four-fucking-am to catch a flight,” she sighs, speaking quickly in her raspy, smoke-tinged voice.
Sinéad lives in a large but unostentatious seafront house in Bray, on the other side of the island, with three of her four children, two male nannies and, for the moment at least, her fourth husband.
She scrunches up her face, weighing the options. Following a serious mental breakdown – not her first – she was recently put on new medication (she has been diagnosed as having both bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders), and has since been making weekly visits to a Harley Street specialist to monitor progress. Although she feels better than she has in ages, and has lost a lot of weight, it’s still early days.
On the other hand, she’s really enjoying herself. Furthermore, between trains and taxis, it’s a four-hour journey home.
“Ah fuck it!” she laughs, whipping a bright pink iPhone out of her colour coordinated Ted Baker bag. “I’m gonna stay. I haven’t had a holiday in years!”
With a badly bitten fingernail, she pecks out an email to her PA, cancelling tomorrow’s flight and medical appointment.
In fairness, if anyone deserves a break, it’s Sinéad O’Connor. Even by her own tumultuous standards, the last nine months or so have been full-on. There’s been a very public search for a man, an improbable-sounding operation on her ladybits (to enhance sexual performance), a tacky Vegas wedding and subsequent on-again/off-again marriage, a widely reported suicide attempt, an acclaimed new album, the cancellation of her world tour, the firing of her manager, too many Twitter rows to mention, and enough newsprint to wallpaper several ghost
estates. Phew!
Despite all of this, she looks great. Around the time of the split from her third husband last year, she really did look like a burnout – a frumpy, frowning, 40-something shadow of her former self. Today, seriously slimmed down and wearing tinted glasses, a purple leather jacket, blue skin-tight designer jeans and a pair of floral Doc Marten boots, she looks more like the Sinéad of old.
“The pills they originally had me on were totally messing me up,” she explains. “My new doc says the doses were way too high. They were making me fat, lethargic... and fucking crazy!”
Sinéad’s never had an easy life, but her most recent travails started last August in the wake of the break-up of her short-lived marriage to Australian musician Steve Cooney (it lasted just eight months). Obviously deciding that the best way to get over one man was to immediately get under another, she embarked on a very public search for a replacement. In prose that alternated between clever and crude, she spelled out her sex-starved situation in a self-penned article for the Sunday Independent.
“My sh**uation sexually/affectionately speaking is so dire that inanimate objects are starting to look good, as are inappropriate and/or unavailable men and/or inappropriate and/or unavailable fruits and vegetables,” she wrote. “I tell you, yams are looking like the winners. Needless to say, what I do for a living makes it hard for me to find men that only want me cuz they like my (legendary) arse. Yet I am in the peak of my sexual prime and way too lovely to be living like a nun. And it’s VERY depressing.”
Sinéad’s romantic life has always been somewhat complicated. Impetuous and flighty when it comes to matters of the heart, she’s what tabloid hacks snidely refer to as a “4x4” – in that she has four children by four different men.
Her first marriage was to English percussionist and producer John Reynolds in 1989. They have a 24-year-old son, Jake, and continue to work together: he has produced several of her records, including the latest one. A brief relationship with Irish Times columnist John Waters resulted in the birth of daughter
Róisín in 1996.
In 2001 she married journalist Nick Sommerland after a whirlwind romance, but they split less than two years later. She has since had two more sons – Shane (8) with Irish trad musician Donal Lunny, and Yeshua (5) with American businessman Frank Bonadio. Lunny was a one night stand; she ended her three-year relationship with Bonadio shortly before marrying Cooney.
A hitherto unheard of 38-year-old Dublin drugs counsellor named Barry Herridge responded to Sinéad’s public plea for a man. Following a three-month courtship, the unlikely couple swopped vows in a pink Cadillac at Vegas’s Little White Chapel on December 8, the day of her 45th birthday. When they split a little over a fortnight later, the redtop headlines crowed, “It’s Been Seven Hours and Fifteen Days...”
She blamed adverse media coverage for both the break-up and a half-hearted suicide attempt, really more of a cry for help, in January 2012. They’ve been on and off as a couple since, but she and Herridge are currently trying to work things out.
Life has been equally topsy-turvy on the professional front. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her breathtaking rendition of the Glenn Close-penned lullaby ‘Lay Your Head Down’ (from the Albert Nobbs soundtrack), but ultimately lost out to Madonna in January.
Having taken a five-year break from the business after 2007’s Theology, she released her ninth studio album How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? in March. Produced by Reynolds, it earned her some of the best reviews of her career and was widely proclaimed to be a stunning return to form. The emotionally fragile singer cracked under the promotional pressure however. Just a couple of weeks into her world tour, she suffered a major meltdown before a show in Munich on April 22 and refused to perform.
Cancelling the rest of the tour, she fled home to Ireland, fired manager Facthna O’Ceallaigh and announced her permanent retirement from the music business on Twitter.
Needless to say, Sinéad being like the Irish weather, all of this is subject to sudden change (and probably will have changed again by the time you read this). If she has been consistent in anything other than the quality of her musical output over the years, it’s been in her inconsistency.
As Sinéad’s official biographer since last December, this writer has been strapped-in for at least some of this ongoing car crash with her. It hasn’t been easy. It’s certainly been emotional. She’s made the trip to my hometown to patch things up after a row that saw us not speaking for almost a month. “I’ll admit I was a total fucking asshole if you’ll admit you
were too,” was as close to a peace treaty as I was going to get.
Sinéad doesn’t want to talk about any of this stuff today. Events are a little too recent and she’s yet to get her head around it all. Rather, she has agreed to rewind 20 years to what remains the single most notorious moment of her controversial career.
When she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II following a spine-tingling a cappella rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘War’ on Saturday Night Live on October 3, 1992, she sparked international fury and condemnation, and totally derailed any chance of serious rock ‘n’
roll superstardom.
“I got the shit kicked out of me for it,” she recalls, shrugging indifferently. “But I was used to having the shit kicked out of me. Plenty of practice before anyone had ever even heard of me. You know that scene in True Romance when the dealer finds Patricia Arquette and beats the shit out of her? And she just keeps laughing at him even though he’s pulverising her? That’s me. Yes, I got very hurt. Because I am a human and a female. But I have a massive spirit that is un-fucking-conquerable.”

It’s taken a couple of hours of mooching around town, but Sinéad’s finally in the mood to be interviewed. We find a quiet table outside a bar on Quay Street, the main hub of Galway’s Latin Quarter, and order a large pot of coffee and a pint of Guinness. The pint is for me. Although a prodigious weed-smoker, she rarely ever touches alcohol, getting through a couple of gallons of coffee a day instead.
“Well, well, well… SNL,” she muses, pouring out a steaming cup. “Hey, that rhymes!”
She laughs throatily and sparks up the first of many Camel Lights. Although it happened two decades ago, and she has done countless interviews in the interim, she has rarely discussed the Pope incident in any great depth. “I never thought there was much point discussing it actually. All the talking was done beforehand – between myself and the Holy Spirit.”
That her faith is absolutely central to her artistic and emotional mindset is obvious from the weighty gold crucifix hanging prominently under the colourfully inked Jesus tattoo on her chest (which she had done in L.A. late last year). “I said this to you yesterday, Olaffy,” she reminds me. “The funniest thing of all is that the biggest proof that all fucking religion has failed is that people think you’re crazy if you believe in God.”
Born in Glenageary in 1966, “I grew up in a country that was thankfully very religious,” she explains. “Ireland was actually a theocracy. There were things about it that were very negative, and I was lucky that I didn’t take any of those on board. I could see it wasn’t giving my grandparents any joy, or my family, or even anybody else in the country. I was able to see through that, and saw that there is actually a Holy Spirit, and that that was a joyful thing.”
Her ongoing personal relationship with the Holy Spirit is pivotal to the Saturday Night Live incident.
“I trusted in the Church,” she admits. “I loved them and I believed in them – you know, I didn’t believe in everything they taught, but I trusted them. And I saw how much my ancestors, like my grandparents and that, had given up for them. Which was joy. Joy is what they had really given up, if you think about it, which is also what all the priests and the nuns had given up as well. And I somehow felt that was contradictory to what the Holy Spirit was. So I gave over my trust to the Church, but not to the same extent that I saw my grandparents do.”
Having somehow survived a horrifically abusive childhood at the hands of her mentally-ill mother, a scarred and deeply troubled Sinéad left for London at the age of 17 to try to make it in the music business. In this ambition, the Glenageary girl admirably succeeded. Her self-produced debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released by Ensign in 1987, and marked the arrival of a fiery new talent. Within five years, the bald and beautiful singer had shifted millions of records, and established herself as a major star.
Such were the myriad demands of her career, not to mention motherhood (she was pregnant with Jake when she recorded her debut), that it took her a while to begin processing her traumatic upbringing and start questioning organised religion.
“About 23 or 24, I was at that age where you begin to understand that everything you thought growing up isn’t true,” she reflects. “I was reading books about the Church, and the fucking shit that they’d been up to. And it was beginning to dawn on me, ‘Hold on, these people went around for hundreds of years murdering people!’”
Whatever about bloody historical events like the Crusades or Spanish Inquisition, other more recent crimes felt far closer to the bone. Around this time, rumours of the child sexual abuse scandals within the Church were beginning to surface.
“I began to come across articles in the newspapers about families who had been trying to bring cases against the Church for child abuse,” she recalls, “some of the victims or survivors, and they were being silenced by the Church. And at the same time I was reading these conspiracy theory books. I remember one of them was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Anyway, these kind of conspiracy theory books, not all of which I would fall for, or whatever. It’s just like the Church’s teachings, really, it’s all, you know, ‘Do you fall for that?’ Or whatever... there’s bits of truth in everything. But anyway, I was beginning to unlearn the shit that I thought was true.”
She pauses for a moment and lights another cigarette. “You know.... it would be false to say that part of all this hasn’t got anything to do with what I experienced as a child in the Ireland that I grew up in, namely whatever abuse I experienced. My mother’s attitude to me as a girl was totally shaped by the Church. Her attitude to herself and her female children and her own sisters and her own mother.”

Sinéad’s dressmaker mother, Marie, was killed instantly in a Dublin car crash on February 10, 1985. Mother and daughter hadn’t spoken for more than a year at the time of her death. There was – and undoubtedly always will be – a lot left unresolved. However, it says everything that, in a landmark legal case, her engineer father, John O’Connor, had won custody of the children from his estranged wife in the Family Law Court.
Much of Sinéad’s recorded output over the years has been born out of the trauma of her childhood. On her first couple of albums, she didn’t just sing about her emotional pain and distress, she also talked to the media about it.
“My records were diaries of personal recovery from child abuse: an Irish female Catholic survivor of child abuse, right,” she explains. “So that’s really who I was, and that’s where if ever I was making protests, that’s what they were about. And when I was getting in trouble, certainly in my private life, it was because I was talking about that.
“And I think, generally, because me and Kurt Cobain, Rosanne Barr, people like that, we were literally the first people who ever talked about being child abuse victims who weren’t blacked out. Up until that point, anyone who ever had been raped or a child abuse survivor or whatever would always have been. So we were really hot potatoes. There was a lot of trouble.”
Although Sinéad’s older brother Joseph, an award-winning novelist, has publicly stated that she has exaggerated the extent of their mother’s abuse, she insists that she was always telling the truth.
“My mother had different types of abuse for all of us,” she recalls, quietly. “In my case, it always involved me being made to take my clothes off. To lie or kneel on the floor and open up limbs so she could kick me in the womb and the vagina. Or bash me in either place with sweeping brushes, hockey sticks, the carpet sweeper pole... shoes... toilet brushes... or just stamping or elbowing or jumping or bouncing.
“It also involved a lot of pouring on me of things like Alpen, coffee, hot and cold water, flour... basic kitchen contents. You’d lie there after she’d finished and gone to bed... for about an hour... and then you’d clean up the kitchen, make the porridge, set the table for the morning, and go to bed. You’d get up for school and come home to the same shit nearly every day.
“She’d make me say things,” she continues. “Like, she’d make me beg for mercy. I’d have to say I’m evil and things like that. The thing that affected my life most was her making me say, ‘I am nothing, I am nothing’, over and over. This shit went on for years. I ran away at 13.”
Although in her more maternal moments she instilled a love of music, singing and literature in her offspring, Marie O’Connor was clearly a deeply disturbed woman. Following her death, Sinéad and her siblings cleared out her belongings and found large quantities of tranquillisers like Mogadon
and Valium.
Despite all the pain and suffering she had been put through, Sinéad still claims to love her late tormentor (regularly dedicating songs “to my dear darling mother” in concerts). She lays much of the blame for what made Marie the person she was squarely at the altar of the Roman Catholic Church.
“I look back and I see what happened with my parents, what happened with their parents, what happened in the Ireland they lived in, what was drummed into them. Just this whole horror, you know, the horrible worship of death, the worship of sadness and misery, it was a sin to think well of yourself, whatever. Just no joy.
“So I just felt in tons of ways as I got up to that age that, ‘Hold on, there is a Holy Spirit and it’s being really very badly misrepresented’. And why that matters is being underemployed. Actually you could fix the world quite quickly if you employed the Holy Spirit, but religion has been very much in the business of taking people’s minds away from the idea of a Holy Spirit, because they completely made the idea of the Holy Spirit a joke. And I felt really strongly about that.”
The actual photograph of Pope John Paul II that Sinéad tore to shreds on SNL had, she says, been taken from the wall of Marie’s home. “Yeah, the photo itself had been on my mother’s bedroom wall since the day the fucker was enthroned in 1978,” she reveals. “Freud would have a field day!”

Sinéad had decided to rip up the Pope’s picture several weeks beforehand. Bob Geldof unwittingly provided the inspiration.
“I was on tour somewhere in Europe, when it dawned on me to do it,” she says. “I had been reading all these books and articles about the Church. I was thinking, ‘What the fuck can I do about this? It’s such a huge establishment and how can anyone do anything about this?’
“I thought of Bob Geldof on Top of The Pops. When the Boomtown Rats went to No 1 in England with ‘Rat Trap’, Geldof went on the show and ripped up a photo of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, who had been No 1 for weeks and weeks before (with ‘Summer Nights’ from the Grease soundtrack, which topped the UK charts for seven weeks in 1978).
“And I thought, ‘Yeah, fuck! What if someone ripped up a picture of the Pope?’ Half of me was just like, ‘Jesus, I’d love to just see what’d happen’.”
Sinéad was already quite a divisive figure. Unwise statements about the IRA and the Northern Ireland situation had landed her in hot water in Ireland and the UK, as had an unprovoked attack on U2 and Paul McGuinness. In the US, she made headlines when she refused to allow ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to be played before a 1990 show at the Garden State Arts Centre in New Jersey. The nonplussed management reluctantly complied and her gig went ahead, but immediately afterwards she was informed that she was banned from ever playing there again.
Frank Sinatra added fuel to the fire when he performed at the Arts Centre the following night. “This Sinéad O’Connor, this must be one stupid broad,” Ol’ Blue Eyes opined onstage. “I’d kick her ass if she was a guy. She must beat her kids to stay in shape.”
There had even been a previous Saturday Night Live controversy that same year, when Sinéad pulled out of what would have been her debut appearance when she discovered that the episode was being hosted by homophobic Brooklyn comedian Andrew Dice Clay.
“A guy working for the record company, a gay guy, rang me and put pressure on me, saying that I shouldn’t do this show because Andrew Dice Clay was on it and he was anti-gay and all this shit. And I went, ‘Oh, okay!’ I’m young, I didn’t know fucking jack shit. I shouldn’t have pulled out. It was someone else’s opinion, so I regret that.”
SNL had subsequently invited her back so there were obviously no hard feelings. However, following her unforgettable appearance on October 3, 1992, she would be banned from the NBC show for life.
Her third album Am I Not Your Girl? (the follow-up to 1990’s mega-selling I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got) had just recently been released. Sinéad arrived at the NBC studios in Manhattan in the company of Ciara Flanagan, an old school friend from Dublin.
“I was really quite calm about it,” she recalls. “We had the sound-check, and I tricked them that I was going to use a picture of this other child, because I had been campaigning on the issue of these street children in Brazil getting beaten and murdered by the cops.
“I did a song called ‘Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home’ and then when I did ‘War’, I produced the photo of this Brazilian child and said (to cameraman), ‘Look, I’m just going to hold this photo up, so I want you to stay still’. Half of me was just wondering what the fuck would happen here. And so I was kind of quite excited, and quite cool as well. Then I had the dress, the Sade dress; that seemed important. It was a cool dress, I wanted to
look good.”
The white dress she wore had previously belonged to British soul diva Sade. “I bought it in a rock ‘n’ roll auction in 1988, probably for 800 quid. And I still have it, and of course it doesn’t even fit me. I don’t know how either of us ever got into it! It was especially made for her and it was the most fantastically handmade beautiful fucking dress: it is gorgeous. My daughter Róisín says she’s going to get married in it. So that’ll be fantastic. A lot of woman-power in that dress.”
She also had a Rasta cloth tied prominently around her microphone, which was more than just a fashion statement. “There’s all the Rasta business which we can get into in a minute. I wasn’t frightened or worried or anything. I wasn’t thinking of, ‘Well, what are the consequences of this going to be?’ I didn’t give a shit because I had nothing to lose. I had loads of fucking money, I had my voice.”
How much money did you have?
“Oh Jesus – lots!” she says, shrugging. “Times have changed now that people don’t buy records anymore. But, back then, from the second album alone, I made about ten million quid. I gave away half of that to various charities, and I kept the rest. That’s fairly much what I’ve lived on ever since. And I can tell you I don’t have that much left, okay (laughs).
“But that’s the kind of money I had so, like, that’s great money to be on at 25 years of age. I can send my kids to school, I don’t have to marry a man except for (that) I love him or whatever. So that’s great, and I’ve nothing to lose. And I did think it out for a few days. I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve enough money, and anyway who’s going to take my throat out?’ Whatever anyone can take away, I know I can stand on the street and make money.”
When the show went live that night, with actor Tim Robbins hosting, things initially went swimmingly.
“I went on, did the first song; that was grand,” she recalls. “The thing I remember most was that backstage – backstage is what I get flashes of most – (it was) a long time ago, and a lot of weed was smoked since! So I remember backstage after the first song, there was all these people milling around, it was all good...
“Anyway, there’s a few more guests and then I go back on, and I do the song (‘War’), and it’s all grand. They’re all a bit bemused, like, ‘What the fuck is she doing this song for anyway?’ And at the end of it I produced this Pope photo which was on my mother’s wall since I was a kid...”
What happened next is still as powerful and shocking to watch today as it was at the time. Staring intensely into the camera, Bambi-like eyes wide, bright and impassioned, Sinéad held up the photo and defiantly declared, “Fight the real enemy!” Then she tore it up and threw the pieces onto the floor. There was a stunned silence from the audience – director Dave Wilson reportedly gave the order not to light up the ‘applause’ light – and then the station went straight to a commercial.
During the closing segment of the show, host Robbins – who was raised Roman Catholic – didn’t even acknowledge her. Meanwhile, the NBC switchboard was inundated with calls from outraged viewers: ultimately they received 4,484 complaints.
“All I remember is I blew out the candles, went backstage, and there was almost nobody there at all. There was tumbleweed. Just doors were all closed, everyone was gone.”
The vibe wasn’t good. Deciding it was probably best to leave, Sinéad and Ciara gathered their belongings and swiftly exited the NBC building.
“Ciara went to school with me, she was a mate, and me and her kind of went to London together. So she was there. And we collected our shit. And we somehow got out of the building and then we got into a taxi, and we went down to St. Mark’s Place to this Rasta place I used to hang out in.”
The first direct public reaction to the show came almost immediately, in the form of eggs thrown on the street. “Yeah, when we got out of the cab these kids threw eggs at us – which missed,” she laughs. “And me and Ciara at school were always the best sprinters. Of course, they didn’t know that, these little fuckers, so we ran after them. There was two of them and we caught them down the end of this road. We didn’t lay a hand on them, we were like, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know what the fuck you’re on about!’ But they were young enough, but they were literally on the ground like this (holds hands up protectively), ‘Okay okay okay okay, we’re sorry, we get it, we
get it!!’
“Then we went home and all I remember is I couldn’t find my manager for days. He later told me he just unplugged his phone. And then I remember going back to Europe and doing some interviews. Then my father came over to London at some point to beg me to stop doing interviews talking about how the Church were evil because he was terrified that I was just going to destroy my career. And I said, as I still feel, that I couldn’t give a shit.”
She may not have cared, but others did. The international press reaction was predictably hysterical. The public one no better. Not since John Lennon’s comment that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” had there been such unabated Christian fury. There were protests, condemnations and public burnings of her albums.
At a time when the Roman Catholic Church had yet to be shamed and exposed as the biggest and best organised paedophile ring on the planet, few fellow artists spoke out publicly in support of her actions. When she returned to America to perform at a birthday concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden on October 16, large sections of the crowd started to boo and hiss. She barely made it through another a cappella version of ‘War’ before tearfully fleeing the stage, where she was comforted by Kris Kristofferson (‘Don’t let the bastards get you down’).
“I think people reacted the way they did because they thought I was someone who didn’t believe in God or didn’t respect Jesus,” she says now. “But in fact I was quite the opposite. And the thing is that people go on like, ‘Well, why is it important?’ Well, it’s important because the Holy Spirit deserves better, and actually the Church deserves better. And we all do deserve a Church that’s run by people who actually believe in God, or act like they have some respect for the Holy Spirit.”

One aspect of the SNL incident has never been properly explained. Up until now, it has always been assumed that Sinéad’s impassioned call to “fight the real enemy” referred to the Vatican. She now claims that that wasn’t what she meant at all.
The Rasta cloth tied around her mic was more significant than anybody realised. She was actually covertly addressing a gang of tooled-up Rastafarian drug dealers operating out of a jeans store across the road from trendy Irish-owned cafe Sin É on St. Marks Place in New York – at the time, a regular haunt of ex-pat artists, musicians, writers and hipsters.
“People have to understand that I was on a bit of a spiritual journey,” she says. “I had got involved with the Rasta movement when I was about 17 and went to England. And that was also part of why I was being how I was about the Pope, because, you know, if you understand the Rasta movement then you understand how they feel about him. They feel that the very office of Pope is anti-Christian.
“So anyway, going alongside all of this is the fact that I’m involved in the Rasta movement. And I used to hang out with these guys down in St. Mark’s Place. Now, a lot of them weren’t proper Rastas as such insofar as... (pauses). Look, let’s make it very clear a real Rastafari person is a person of pure peace. But I was hanging out with these guys anyway, and they were running a jeans shop, but really it was a front – they were selling, you know, what I thought was just weed of course, but in my innocence; I’ve later understood there was a lot more going on.
“And when I found that out I was really horrified because I fucking was so inspired by Rasta people,” she continues. “I found out some of these guys were sending kids around with guns in their schoolbags, and drugs in their schoolbags, and all of that. And I was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You’re saying you’re Rastas and you’re fucking up Rasta altogether!’”
Sinéad had been particularly friendly with one of these dealers. “Yeah, a guy called Terry. He had been shot a couple of times, and I really fucking loved this man, he was so fucking good to me... but nothing [sexual] going on. They just used to come and get me if they knew I was getting the shit kicked out of me somewhere.
“I used to hang out in Sin É. I think I only hung out there because these guys were across the road from it. They’d bring me around different Rasta places in New York and make sure I got fed, and shit like that. Anyway, somebody had shot Terry because he had started selling drugs or whatever, and I was really upset because he told me somebody was going to shoot him again. It was the same thing about the Church, you know, the Church claimed they were representing Christ and these fuckers were claiming they were representing Rasta. And you know, I’m loving Christ and I’m loving Rasta. But if all these fuckers are misrepresenting it then what’s the point?
“So when I did Saturday Night Live, a part of it was that,” she continues. “When I said, ‘fight the real enemy’, I was talking to them. ‘Fight the real enemy’ was nothing to do with the Church. Why I tied the Rasta cloth on the microphone was: I was trying to talk to these guys, and the gangs that were about to kill my mate.”
Her plea fell on deaf ears. Terry was blasted away a few months later by a business rival. “It was awful – just awful,” she sighs. “I was devastated. I think I was in London when I found out. The next time I was over there I went down to see them all, and Terry had bought me a coat that he used to keep there for me; a big warm kind of thing.”
She shivers involuntarily and shakes her head. “I still have the coat.”

Two decades on from the Pope incident, Sinéad O’Connor has still never been asked back onto Saturday Night Live. Although the footage is readily available to view on YouTube, all NBC reruns of that particular episode feature the dress rehearsal take of ‘War’, in which she holds up the picture of the Brazilian child at the end. While she paid a serious price for her actions, she has few regrets.
“Well, I didn’t enjoy everyone treating me like a crazy person for 20 years,” she laughs. “Of course I am a crazy person, but I didn’t enjoy people putting that in the list of why I’m crazy. There is a box of evidence that I’m crazy, but there’s certain things that shouldn’t be in there.
“Like, I went on Oprah about bipolar disorder, and of course they flashed the picture of me ripping up a picture of the Pope as if, you know, I did it because I have bipolar disorder. And I’m like, ‘No it’s not like that actually.’”
Although she has continued to record albums, tour internationally, and court controversy, her once massively successful career has never really recovered. This doesn’t particularly bother her either.
“Well, I had enough money is the thing,” she insists. “So I’m looked after, I have everything I need. I didn’t need, and don’t want, the huge rock star career. I never wanted to do the things you have to do in order to have that, like leave my kids for fucking ages or prostitute myself or whatever. What I did, if anything, was rip up the very thing that was killing me. I’m not a pop star. It didn’t fit my personality. I just wanted to make music because I had shit to get off my chest.
“I mean, it’s about how do you define success? There are all these other people around you when you’re a musician, and they want lots of money off you because of you. And it’s like they have this idea of what success is, and they put that on you. But I don’t define success in terms of financial gain or material gain, or fame, or a good name, or people thinking well of me. I’m not on Earth to win a popularity contest.
“Since I was young when I got into the music business I saw it like a board game: you know, I have got to get from one side of this board to the other, and at the end of it I’ve got to still be me, and be true to who I wanted to be, and be true to my relationship with the Holy Spirit. Do you know what I mean?”
Sinéad O’Connor stubs out her umpteenth cigarette, raises her shaved head and, through pursed lips, coolly blows a narrow stream of blue smoke towards the Galway sky. “In that regard I’m a triumph as far as I’m concerned.”