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My heart is broken for the story of Sinéad that most people don’t know. For the emotional support she wasn’t able to receive as a child and as an artist wasn’t offered by her industry. Hopefully now her story will be examined and told in a way that can shed more light on her life and struggles so she can be celebrated and admired for what she was able to achieve and overcome regardless of those that didn’t try to understand her. Thank you to the sister that gave her a guitar, who gave her a voice when she didn’t know she had one. We have been so blessed. ‘She was Ireland’s warrior queen’ Dublin Aids Alliance, now the charity HIV Ireland, was then a collective of community and voluntary organisations working with, and advocating for, people living with HIV and Aids. Sinéad’s decision to wear the T-shirt, which she probably considered a small gesture of solidarity, had a far-reaching impact on the community of people living with HIV in Ireland. Devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly provocative’ ... O’Connor in the Netherlands. Photograph: Michel Linssen/Redferns Sheryl Garratt A decade or so ago Sheryl Garratt was often awake at dawn, dancing in nightclubs and drinking vodka shots. She is still often up early, but these days you’ll find her foraging in the fields for mushrooms or for seaweed on the shores of Deal in Kent, where she now lives. The former editor of The Face… read more Portraits by Things could be worse, she adds. “There’s no bad vibes, we haven’t had a bad word between us, we haven’t been mean to each other, there’s nothing but niceness. So I can’t complain.”
Today, the house is empty except for Sinéad and her cute little Yorkshire terriers, Susan and Katie. “They’re filthy, I’m afraid,” she says. “They haven’t had a bath for days. I love them, though. They’re so funny. All they care about is food, sleep and snuggles. They’re like new babies.” Inside, the house is warm and homely, full of the cheerful clutter and chaos of family life. Spend any time at all with Sinéad and it’s clear that her children are the most important things in her life. Her relationships with their fathers have sometimes been complicated, but somehow, she’s made it all work. “It’s easy if you both want to.” She shrugs. “And it’s selfish not to. I’m a compartmentaliser.” We talk, for a while, about her battles with depression. Seven years ago, after her son Shane was born, she was feeling very low, even suicidal. Shane’s father, the traditional Irish musician Dónal Lunny, was married at the time, and things were difficult. “I felt it was my fault. I was really depressed.”
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I’ve known Neil since I was 19 or 20, and I always had a crush on him, before he was married, or before I met Frank. And they all knew it. I’m never going to act on it – it’s just a funny song about how one might fantasise occasionally about one’s boyfriend’s best friend! And I love the idea of being this old lady but still being this loving, sexual creature. Being 80, and sensually all wrapped up in the man I love.” Sinéad says she believes happiness is a person’s natural birthright. Happiness is a choice. You can get up every day and you can choose to be miserable, or you can choose to be happy. When people said that to me when I was younger, I used to think, ‘What do you know? I’ve got plenty to be unhappy about.’ But now, I feel differently.” I first met Sinéad when she was still in school in the early 80s. She came along to Eamonn Andrews’ recording studio in Dublin to make a demo of her song Take My Hand with our band In Tua Na – she loved being part of it all. She walked in carrying her canvas school bag. I remember her hero Kate Bush’s name carefully etched in marker on it. She’s learned to cultivate a better relationship with the press in recent years – “They’re very fond of me because I’m good copy, I’m colourful”– but also perhaps to use her internal edit button more often, to protect herself a little better. Although her faith is as strong as ever, for instance, she tends to see it now more as a personal matter than something to be discussed at length in the media. But ‘compromise’ is still not a word that features often in her vocabulary, and she’s now reached an age where people have come to respect her for simply remaining completely, unashamedly herself.
A still from Nothing Compares, the 2022 documentary directed by Kathryn Ferguson. Photograph: Alamy Finally, I broach the subject of her brief marriage. “Look.” She shrugs. “I know this might seem dreadfully cold-hearted, but I actually do see the funny side of it all. There’s no point crying. I’ve had enough practice. I know what happens when you break up. You feel shit for an hour or two, then you’re all right, then you’re shit for another hour or two, and then one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll be grand. The best way to get over one man is to get under another!”But her new album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, is her most straightforwardly commercial for years. Released this February, it was recorded in London with her ex-husband and long-time collaborator, producer John Reynolds, who is Jake’s father as well as one of her best friends. “He knows me artistically better than anyone, so he knows how to get the best out of me. And he always has a very casual set-up in his house, so you don’t really feel like the red light is on. I was recording in my nightdress and slippers!”
And it’s been such fun!” Sinéad adds. “I think women are just as slutty as men are. I don’t think we’re all that different from men sexually; it’s only that we’ve been raised to be all quiet about it.” Last time she was in Los Angeles, she had an injection in her G-spot, designed to increase sexual response. “It’s great!” she enthuses. “And I’m happy to report that it lasts for a very long time.” She also took steps to ensure that there would be no more children. “I’ve had my tubes done, and that’s sort of set me free as well. Best thing I ever did, except I have a scar that won’t go away. But it was only a few months ago.” She’s enjoying sharing this girly phase with her daughter – it’s something she says she missed in her own troubled childhood. By the time she was Róisín’s age, she was living with her father, who was one of the first men in Ireland to win full custody of his children. Her mother died in a car accident two years later, when Sinéad was just 17. “When I was growing up, she wasn’t well, so it was hard for her to make me feel good about being a girl. But now I find my daughter is doing that, which is fantastic and completely accidental.” Since then, it’s become the norm to portray her as eccentric, self-destructive, even mad, but even if her message hasn’t always been articulated clearly, it has stayed consistent, and time has proved her right on many things. Report after report is now making clear the extent of both the abuse of children in Ireland and the Catholic Church’s attempts to cover it up. When I ask if she feels vindicated by this, she quietly says that isn’t important. “What matters is that the people this happened to have been vindicated.” 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 …”
The fabulously outspoken singer
HIV Ireland’s community support manager, Dr Erin Nugent, says: “Many people living with HIV recall, years later, the profound impact of seeing Sinéad in the T-shirt and listening to her advocating for people living with HIV and Aids who felt judged, marginalised and frightened.” Sinéad O’Connor photographed for the Observer New Review in 2014. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer ‘The power of her voice broke the mic’ Dressed in red leather trousers and a green sweat top embellished with the Christian fish logo, Sinéad herself is similarly unaffected. Her face is free of make-up, and her dark, cropped hair is sprinkled with the first signs of grey. She looks great, but as we settle down to talk, she says she can only get away with being this casual because Róisín isn’t here. “She nags me to dress nicely – she puts make-up on me and makes me stagger around the shopping centre in my stilettos!”
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