IT’S STILL DIFFICULT to believe that on a dull, grey evening a year ago came the news that Sinéad O’Connor had passed away unexpectedly in London.
Globally we had already experienced the recent losses of musical legends like David Bowie and Prince, but O’Connor’s death felt particularly shocking. Here in Ireland, you could feel the emotional shift as the country moved towards mourning her.
The reaction was in large part due to O’Connor’s age (she was just 56), and the knowledge that she had experienced the tragic loss of her son Shane in 2022. In January of this year, it was determined that she had died of natural causes.
In a way, Sinéad O’Connor felt like Ireland’s daughter, and so even when her actions could be difficult to understand, the love persisted.
On the day of her funeral, hundreds of people walked along the Bray seafront and past her home, carrying flowers and speaking loudly of the love they had long felt for her. Among them was a group of abuse survivors who felt particularly connected to her story.
Nothing Compares
Before O’Connor’s death, Belfast director Kathryn Ferguson released a documentary about her called Nothing Compares (2022).
Leaving the cinema after a preview screening, I felt a little shocked by what I had watched. I recognised that it wasn’t a simplistic overview of her career, but instead a reckoning with what she dealt with in the 1980s and 1990s, as a young woman working in a misogynistic industry and coming from an Ireland that was slowly beginning to separate Church from State.
Though the documentary didn’t get into the later years of O’Connor’s life, by telling the story of everything that had happened to her up to the late 1990s us viewers could understand the full scale of what occurred and how it impacted on her. Suddenly, individual incidents could be knitted together into a troubling tapestry.
But while the documentary focused on O’Connor’s experiences, I could see too that it was a reckoning with Ireland’s past. It was one woman’s story, but through her story it explored how women have been treated in Ireland throughout the decades, and the impact of societal issues – like church abuse and domestic violence – on generations.
‘Radical icon’
Ferguson’s documentary helped force through a greater reassessment of Sinéad O’Connor’s career and how she had been treated – and that’s how we know it’s a powerful piece of work.
In particular, it looked at the fallout from O’Connor tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992. Ferguson was herself deeply affected by O’Connor’s “horrific takedown” afterwards.
“It just honestly… it made such a dent on me, and it was just so demoralising,” Ferguson told me when we spoke for The Journal in 2022.
“To have this radical icon from our island be treated the way she was, I honestly can say that that’s where the seeds for the film were really sown, because it just had a huge effect, a profound effect.”
There’s something particularly powerful about the young Ferguson growing up to become a woman telling another woman’s story afresh.
It feels important to watch Nothing Compares as we mark one year without Sinéad O’Connor, but also because of what has happened so far in 2024. We’ve seen horrifying new revelations emerge about Bishop Eamon Casey, and we’ve seen women speak out publicly about their experiences of violence and abuse. We can see as clearly as ever that as much as things change, many things remain the same in Ireland.
The documentary highlights the importance of women telling their stories and the importance, too, of being an Ireland that is able to look backwards as it looks forward. For how can we make the country a better place if we can’t learn from the grievous mistakes of the past?
Speaking out
A lot of the discussion after Nothing Compares’ release was about how if O’Connor – a true iconoclast – had done much of what she did during her early career now, she would have been lauded for it.
I’m not wholly convinced that is the case, as women who speak out in music are not always well-rewarded. As a result, we see huge pop stars like Taylor Swift effectively being forced to stay publicly apolitical for many years in an attempt not to give their critics more fuel – and then be hugely criticised when they give their take. But it’s right to say that thanks to women like Sinéad, today’s pop stars have more confidence in their innate right to speak their truth.
Nothing Compares is being screened at Merrion Square Park in Dublin tonight as one of four public screenings being organised by Happenings (who are long behind excellent community-oriented events in Dublin). Sinéad O’Connor’s rarity as a solo female Irish music legend is highlighted by the fact the other three events pay homage to men: Shane MacGowan, Phil Lynott and Luke Kelly.
But the music industry has been changing since Sinéad’s heyday. It might still retain many of the problems she railed against (just glance at the depressing data on who gets played on Irish radio, as collected by Why Not Her?), but look at the women who are now making waves in Irish music, across the genres: CMAT, Jazzy, Pillow Queens and so many more.
Indeed, the gift of being an Irish musician is you can harness some of Sinéad O’Connor’s spirit yourself.
But for the rest of us, a watch of Nothing Compares could prove utterly inspiring too.
Nothing Compares will be on Sky Documentaries at 7pm tonight and can be bought through the Sky Store.
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