Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born on December 8, 1966, in Glenageary, County Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of John (sometimes called Sean), an engineer turned barrister, and Marie, a professional cook and seamstress turned homemaker. She was the third of four O’Connor children. Her eldest brother, Joseph, is an award-winning novelist. Her second brother, Eimear, is a distinguished historian. Her youngest, John, became a psychotherapist. And Sinéad went on to have a successful music career and sold millions of records worldwide. On top of that, she was objectified, criticized, psychoanalyzed, hospitalized, scandalized, and all too often dismissed as the main character in a slow-motion disaster. How did all this happen?
Let’s start again, this time with a different set of facts: Sinéad’s birthday falls on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the 1960s, under the Catholic theocracy in Ireland, this was a significant date. The celebration of the Virgin Mary’s sinless life was the unofficial start of the Christmas season. Schools were closed on this day, the faithful flocked to churches, and reports of religious visions came from all over the country.
The parents chose a third name for their daughter, Bernadette, in honor of Bernadette Soubirous, who experienced Marian apparitions as a teenager. Bernadette was canonized through her visions, while Mary gained another incarnation, Our Lady of Lourdes. As a child, O’Connor also believed in this miracle, for which, as she herself admits, she had tangible proof: when her grandmother poured holy water from Lourdes on her foot, a wart that was disfiguring her leg and was supposed to be surgically removed, disappeared.
In short, Sinéad O’Connor was born and raised Catholic, which was not unusual for Irish children of her generation. As she once explained, “if a bishop walked down the street, people would move aside to make way for him. If a bishop turned up at a national sporting event, all the players on the team would fall on their knees and kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ we’d say, ‘Even bishops make mistakes.'”
The O’Connors were certainly not perfect. In fact, they were imperfect enough, if not terrifyingly imperfect. Even today, let alone then, most children prefer to keep their stories to themselves and their families quiet, not only because “nobody’s perfect” but also because of the deep shame that comes with admitting your own imperfections to yourself, let alone the rest of the world. As anyone who has been abused, including you, will tell you, the psychological mechanism of abuse is largely based on the victim being lulled into a conspiracy of silence by their abuser, believing that on some level they deserve to be treated this way or that there’s something wrong with them.
Sinead O’Connor in Poznań in 2007 Photo: Beata Ziemowska / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Abused children are told not to tell anyone, and if they do, no one usually believes them, and even if they do, it’s worse when the abuse comes to light. So when you’re faced with violence, as part of your survival strategy, you become adept at hiding evidence. If you want to survive, not a whiff of anyone.
Of course, there are always people who will notice. As O’Connor recounts, the nuns at her school often wondered why her clothes were dirty, why she went hungry, and where all the bruises on her body came from. Sometimes they asked questions, and sometimes they simply said it was her mother’s fault. At those times, she denied everything, to protect her mother, and herself, from her retaliation. But as an adult, ever since she became a public figure, she has spoken openly and forthrightly about her upbringing, recalling experiences that are hard to hear about—and no doubt even harder to endure.
In her memoir, she describes without provocation the almost daily rages of her mother, who would make her strip naked and beat her genitals, telling her how deeply she regretted having given birth to her, how much she hated that Sinéad was a girl, and how she wanted to rip out her womb. She would make her daughter beg for mercy and repeat, over and over, “I am nothing,” until O’Connor began to feel as if she really was nothing.
Afterwards, her mother often locked her in her room or in the cupboard under the stairs. And where was her father? In his memoirs, O’Connor mentions at one point when he broke down the door and took her to the doctor, clearly unsettled by the sight of her bloody face, but he had little to say about it then or later, or even when the police appeared on their doorstep, called by concerned neighbours who had heard screams coming from the house.
Like the rest of the O’Connor family, he too had been part of a conspiracy of silence. No one said a word, fearing that the police would be able to do little, and that when she left, her mother would start beating them again, perhaps even more viciously. During the beatings, O’Connor sometimes saw Jesus. She imagined him hanging on a cross on a small rocky hill. He promised that he would replace the blood her mother had taken with his own, that it would make her heart strong and able to survive.
At the time, the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to divorce, and the Irish constitution strictly forbade it. Despite this, Sinéad’s father abandoned the family when she was seven or eight. Her mother was so distraught that she banished the children to the backyard, where they lived for several weeks in a shed that their father had built for fun.
On another occasion, she became furious with Sinéad over a missing button on a worn-out dress, locking her in a dark room and taking the rest of her siblings to a friend’s house for the weekend. Trapped, hungry, scared, and all alone, the girl began to pray to God, promising eternal piety if only he would save her.
In a sense, O’Connor’s prayer had been answered. Six years later, her father won full custody of the children, a miracle in a country where the courts had consistently sided with the mothers in cases of separation and where divorce was not legalized until a decade later. But while the verdict was miraculous, it could not erase thirteen years of abuse and gross neglect, thirteen years without proper parental care. In the years since she moved in with her father, O’Connor had been wandering the streets, skipping school, shoplifting, and robbing passersby. She had been expelled from at least three schools and taken to the police station seven or eight times.
In many ways, this story parallels my own experiences, even though I am four years younger than Sinéad O’Connor and grew up in an environment free of the dictates of the Church, but I knew many girls like her: girls who sold cigarettes from their school lockers for a dollar, girls who got into fights in the churchyard because someone looked at them the wrong way, girls who had trouble respecting authority because the only authority they had experienced was arbitrary, thoughtless, and ruthless, or no authority at all.
Sinead O’Connor in 2013 in Wrocław Photo: Maciej Świerczyński / Agencja Wyborcza.pl
I really wish I could say I wasn’t one of them. That I had a better life or more common sense. But the truth is, as a teenager I was also crazy and ran away from responsibility. From my father and his tantrums, from my mother and her silence or complaints, and most of all from myself. I often managed to outrun my own shadow, but every now and then it caught up with me.
(…)
It was easy to forge my mother’s signature on excuses, and even easier to simply check in for morning homeroom and sneak out the side door to meet T, who lived across the street. Her mother worked from dawn to dusk, and her father was never around, so we either hung out at her apartment or took the bus and then the train to South Street, where we browsed the famous punk shops, accosted strangers and asked for money for cigarettes and alcohol, and went to our favorite fortune teller, Mrs. Olivier, to have her tell our fortunes.
No one ever asked us why we were wandering around the city in broad daylight. And if someone did, we burst out laughing and ran away. We were always running away from something, from all those feelings we couldn’t talk about. It was our sad version of freedom: running away from the fact that no one understood us or simply cared enough to help us get out of it.
Sinéad O’Connor’s situation was different. At the urging of social workers, her father placed her in the care of nuns at An Grianán, a girls’ reform school run by the Catholic Church and funded by the Irish Department of Education. At its worst, these institutions took children from teenage mothers shortly after birth. Years later, mass graves were discovered on the grounds, with only the name “Magdalene” carved on the gravestones.
By the 1980s, when O’Connor arrived at An Grianán, such deeply shameful practices were rare, and the girls who had experienced them in their youth were long gone, living out their days in solitude in the hospice on the grounds. Still, O’Connor describes her time at An Grianán as a “Dickensian” experience.
As she recalls, the girls were kept under lock and key and made to understand at every turn that their families wanted nothing to do with them. As punishment for breaking the rules, they were forced to sleep on the floor of the hospice, amid the moans and screams of dying women, and education was replaced by activities such as washing the moon’s robes in cold soapy water in the laundry room, which was located in the basement. The justification for such a strict approach was supposed to be to instill discipline and lead the wayward girls onto the path of righteousness leading to salvation.
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Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
