Sinéad O’Connor wrote her own rules, and I intend to live by them

These four words changed my life. As a young girl in 1990s Belfast, being politically engaged wasn’t a choice. Politics was in the air, the atmosphere heavy with violence and injustice and trauma, and there was no alternative but to try and do something about it. Sometimes I meet men, mostly white, mostly English or American men, who cheerfully tell me they don’t care about politics. What a grotesque privilege it is, to not care about politics. “You’re a white financially privileged man working in a male-dominated industry,” I normally reply. “What would motivate you to care about politics, apart from compassion, empathy and an innate sense of justice?” Every time I protest political apathy, Sinéad O’Connor flashes through my mind, because she too, did not see apathy as an option. Like Angela Davis, Greta Thunberg, Mikaela Loach and countless other women who inspire me today, Sinéad O’Connor was incapable of ignoring injustice. Apathy is a luxury that most people cannot afford.

During her 1990 tour of America, there was a furore after it was reported she’d requested that The Star-Spangled Banner not be played before her gigs. Frank Sinatra declared she should have her arse kicked; MC Hammer made a big song and dance about buying her a first-class ticket back to Ireland, protestors gathered outside her shows. Eventually, she put on a wig and sunglasses and joined the mob, giving an interview pretending to be an outraged protestor from Saratoga. “I define success by whether I keep the contract I made with the Holy Spirit before I made one with the music business,” she writes. “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl.”

“She was our generation’s Irish revolutionary, a true punk,” says my friend Róisín. “She transcended barriers, definitions, always standing up to power. She was as human as she was extraordinary. And her humanity was extraordinary, always motivated by love, in Irish, grá.”

Sinéad O’Connor did not find protest easy; she found it necessary. “There’s no way I’m gonna shut my mouth. I’m a battered child,” Sinéad once declared. She was born into a physically and emotionally abusive household, and due to “shoplifting and truancy” was sent to spend 18 months at Grianán Training Centre in Dublin, formerly a Magdalene asylum. As Kathryn says, “Sinéad didn’t come from outer space; she was part of a system that was hugely broken and abusive from the top down.”

Christie Goodwin