Sinead O’Connor Was Right

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t remember watching Sinead O’Connor rip up her mother’s photo of Pope John Paul II— in 1992, I was barely four years old—yet that image of a shaved-headed, doe-eyed woman throwing the shredded photo at the camera never left my consciousness. 

Perhaps it was the American outrage I remembered, outrage more concerned with Sinead’s action than her message: Fight the real enemy. 

We know now what we were too afraid to say then: Sinead O’Connor was right.

In 1992, Sinead spoke for victims of clergy sex abuse and all childhood abuse, as well as for the children, teenagers, and women of Ireland. For Sinead, it was always personal. When she was 15, Sinead’s family sent her to a Magdalene laundry in Dublin’s Drumcondra neighborhood; she spent 18 months in the asylum, which was run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. More than a decade after Sinead left the home, exhumations at the site of the former Magdalene laundry yielded mass graves of girls and women kept at the home. 

Sinead described her experience at the Drumcondra laundry in a 2010 Washington Post editorial responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s apology to Ireland for priest sex abuse:

When I was a young girl, my mother—an abusive, less-than-perfect parent— encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored ‘Magdalene laundries,’ which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests' clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.

Sinead claimed that the Magdalene laundry was “a product of the Irish government's relationship with the Vatican”—a long, painful history. Her life’s work was to bring justice to abuse victims, in her native Ireland and beyond. Her 1992 SNL performance was just one such act of speaking truth to power.

Today, we remember Sinead O’Connor as a prophetic voice, a seeker of justice, and a rebellious truth-teller. May she rest in power.