Sinead ripped up Church’s hypocrisy

IN MOST people’s musical educations there are just a couple of those thunderbolt moments. A handful of visceral experiences where we realise everything we thought we knew up to then was wrong.

I remember one in 1987, sitting in our front room and hitting play on an album by an unknown young Dublin woman. Sinead O’Connor’s voice filled the house and struck one of the those deep first cuts that music can on the psyche and the soul.

Who knew screaming could be so demented and so beautiful?

You listened to that astonishing voice on a song like Troy telling stories of kids staying warm in the long grass in summer during a Dublin rainstorm and could see your own place anew.

Little did we realise then the terrible beauty that was being born.

Having sung an acapella version of a Bob Marley song she turned those haunting eyes to the camera, held up a photo of Pope John Paul II and ripped it to pieces, declaring: “Fight the real enemy.”

It’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to dismiss it as a stunt. But in 1992 there were very few voices calling out the sins of the Catholic Church.

This was seven years before the States of Fear programme opened many Irish people’s eyes to the horrors inflicted on children, and two years before the exposure of paedophile priest Brendan Smyth opened the floodgates that would rock the foundations of both church and state.

It remains one of the bravest acts by an Irish artist, a blow to the wall of silence about the generational abuse of children.

Sinead now says it didn’t derail her career but put her on track to be who she really was.

But at the time she seemed to pay a high price. The flipside image to the outraged woman is of Kris Kristofferson placing a consoling arm around her shoulder as she was booed off stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert two weeks later.

That arm around the shoulder is a posture many Irish people have adopted to Sinead since. The very public heartaches she has endured over the years have underlined the vulnerable side that always seemed to be there.

But next month it will be 30 years since that iconic Saturday Night Live moment. It’s a good time to be reminded of that other Sinead. The one with that rare strength of conviction. And be glad she had the courage to speak up.