My mother, myself
Sunday January 21 2001
AN WE stick to music? Not boring usual bollox. As practised by others. Will be dumb on other than music." That was the message Sinead O'Connor sent me just hours before this interview took place. And yet, moments after I sat down in her Dublin city centre apartment she immediately, and gracefully, conceded that there is no way we can talk about her music and not trace its roots back to her private life and psychology. In fact, towards the end of our two-hour conversation Sinead spread her own CDs in a line along her living room table and named the specific songs that chart her "spiritual recovery", from the debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987, to the latest and best Faith and Courage.
But first, yes folks, as with the What Doesn't Belong To Me track from that album, Sinead's "not usual bollox" line is a direct dig at the media. Specifically those journalists who print "patent lies" that damage herself or her children. Sinead has one son, Jake, with former husband John Reynolds, and a daughter, Roisin, with John Waters. The latter and O'Connor recently fought a prolonged legal battle for custody of the child.
"I was very hurt by the coverage of what was going on concerning my daughter, the suggestion by the media that I abused my child," she says, lighting a cigarette. "And by RTÉ radio shows discussing what kind of mother I'd be, with people phoning up saying they wouldn't let their children near me. A child I used to babysit called and was abused for saying how appalling it was that anyone should conduct a show like this, based on tabloid rumours that I was being charged for child abuse, which were not true. Yet there were radio shows, with the discussion being 'Is Sinead O'Connor a fit mother?' I resent how the media suggested that I might be a child abuser, which was a soul-murder, attack on everything I stand for."
Sinead obviously is anxious to address this issue finally. In so far as she can while respecting legal restrictions. "I won't discuss the details of the case but I will discuss my feelings and how it affected me emotionally," she says, angrily. And she insists two articles in the Sunday Independent "destroyed" her relationship with John.
"One thing the paper printed when they found out I was having John's baby really killed me, and traumatised both of us to the point that we broke up," Sinead explains. "They not only ran a piece, by [Eamon] Dunphy, which called me a liar over child abuse and slagged off John horribly, but on the same day Terry Keane's column said since I wasn't saying who the baby's dad was 'If the father of Sinead's baby is who we think it is, then she is wise not to tell anyone.' They wrote about him as if he was some kind of thing I should be ashamed of making a baby with. Some country bumpkin. It was humiliating and soul-destroying for both of us. Also all that week we were harassed by paparazzi and phone calls from journalists. That put pressures on the relationship which neither John nor I were able to surmount. And I do believe the media were responsible for what then took place between myself and John in terms of fighting over Roisin."
Whatever about Dunphy's attack on Sinead O'Connor, the position of the Sunday Independent on that Keane comment is that it was "more of a throwaway line, a joke even if cruel at a time when, as Sinead says, most newspapers were doorstepping, phoning and hounding the woman." Either way, Sinead certainly believes that her claim on Gay Byrne's show that she'd "targeted" John to become the father of her child was presented as her saying she sought him out as a "donor".
"What I had said was that it was 'a donor situation'. Meaning both of us were in a situation where we were friends having a baby together without necessarilygoing out with each other. But, obviously, because a lot of people had grudges against John, they all set out to say I said he was some kind of 'sperm donor', which, sadly, he believed. And it resulted in years of misunderstanding, great pain for John and myself. Nothing I said implied he was a sperm donor, didn't want him involved with his child or that he wasn't entitled to be."
As such Sinead "absolutely" agrees that "media-wise" she and Waters went through a baptism of fire.
"Yet thank God, after that baptism of fire we're coming to having a respect for each other. And a liking for each other. That was always there. But we went through difficult times, hurt each other a lot."
A "liking"? Wasn't Sinead ever the kind of romantic who believed "I'll only have a child with someone I am deeply in love with?"
"At that point, the way I felt about myself was so low I didn't believe it would be possible for me to have a child in a relationship because I felt I was so awful nobody would want to live with me," she says. "And yet I love John deeply. Always have done. So when I say I 'targeted' him it sounds colder than I mean. I meant I got to know him, realised what an incredible human being he was and that if I was going to have a child I'd like to have a child with him, whether we were together or not."
Why was Sinead's self-esteem so low? She was "very young, lonely, suffering from severe depression, the effects of being famous, the effects of living away from home." As in the soul-cry she penned for the sleeve notes of her album Am I Not Your Girl?
"Yeah. But all of my work is a fucking soul-cry!" Sinead responds, smiling. "The earlier songs are like prayers. And from Gospel Oak onwards I start getting answers."
Many of Sinead's early songs also are rooted in anger. "Justifiable anger," she retorts. "In terms of child abuse by my mother. My chosen mission was to do what I could to make sure that this would never happen again. In any home. But I grew up in a family where this nightmare was happening to me. So of course I was angry. I was the physical embodiment of the effects of child abuse. But I wasn't only angry. I wouldn't even say anger dominates my early music. Pain did. Yet I did believe music was a safe place to put all those feelings. I never went around beating people, jacking up, destroying myself. What I did was wrote songs about it. But I wrote, equally, fragile songs. And part of the reason I was so angry was because I am a terribly tender person."
Sinead sighs sadly. "I distinctly remember, one day, riding on the back of someone's bike, as a kid, deciding to act really tough, curse a lot, thinking this would get me through life. It became a form of self-protection because I am so fucking vulnerable."
At this point, Sinead O'Connor is talking as though addressing a therapist, something she "only began to do when I was 28, I was that angry and, worse, didn't know why." As for the answer to that question? Well, given that Sinead feels her story has so often been "misrepresented" in the press and was more often told when Sinead was nearer 24 than 34, it's time to revisit the tale.
SINEAD was born on December 8, 1966, and raised in a middle-class area of Dun Laoghaire. Her parents separated when she was eight; Sinead lived with her mother until she was 13, then "ran away" and moved in with her dad. However, within a year she was sent to An Grianan in Drumcondra, Dublin, described by Sinead as a rehabilitation centre for girls with behavioural problems, and there, while she was "in care", a Sister Margaret gave Sinead a guitar, which led to her writing songs.
While singing Evergreen at the wedding of a relative of the same nun, Sinead attracted the attention of In Tua Nua, which led to her co-writing the band's first single. Thus kick-starting her career in music. But who put Sinead "in care" in the first place?
"My father, on the recommendation of a lousy social worker," she explains. "I had been brought up by my mother to steal so I got into a lot of trouble. I was extremely disturbed, having had the shit kicked out of me every day of my life. So I couldn't adjust to what was, supposedly, normal life in my father's house. And I didn't go to school, was robbing money off my dad, and he got worried I'd end up on the wrong side of the tracks. Or end up like my mother."
Surely Sinead's mother didn't bring her up to steal?
"She did. That was how I avoided being beaten. She had a scam, that started when I was 11, where she would drive me into town and I'd get a flag day box and give a false name and address and she'd drive me round pubs at night and I'd collect money. Then she'd keep the money. So the police finally caught me. In the Club in Dalkey. But thank God it was a sergeant who'd been in our house a few times. Because the neighbours would hear us scream and call the police. He knew my mother was a nutter. So he didn't arrest me. But a few months later I fucked off. And spent eight months with my dad, not settling down. And my stepmother was concerned about me so she called a social worker, who sent me to An Grianan. I wouldn't be doing any of this the music, my mission in life, trying to give a voice to those who have almost been murdered in our own homes were it not for where I came from."
When Sinead says the sergeant "knew" Sinead's mother was a "nutter", is that just Sinead's remembered reality or the truth? Joe O'Connor, Sinead's brother, says things were not that horrific.
"Joe wasn't beaten. A lot of the violence took place when he was out of the house. Though he hauled my mother off us enough times to know what happened. Joe has problems with me. It's not easy for him, that I need to be so open. He has his own way of dealing with it, I have mine."
Do Joe and Sinead get on well now?
"We're not close. Because we both have our own pain to deal with." Part of Sinead's personal pain she claims was the breaking down of her sense of self-esteem, confidence and identity.
"It was that kind of psychological destruction," she elaborates. "On a regular basis I'd be made to take off my clothes and lie on the floor while she kicked me here [gestures towards genitals] and spit at it. And make me say things like 'I'm nothing,' and ask for mercy. There was a lot of sadism. The violence was sexually abusive."
If a mother spits at a young girl's genitals, how does that child go on to assert her sexuality in an even half-way healthy sense?
"And feel comfortable being a girl?" Sinead responds. "That's why I was very angry for years. But my intention was not to let my mother destroy my sexuality. Or spirit, which is often your sexuality. But, yeah, I had great difficulty being a female."
THAT said, last year Sinead told Hot Press during the interview where she disclosed she'd had at least one lesbian love affair but "preferred men" that she was "seriously lusting after grown-ups by the time I was eight." So was she able to save her sexuality, say "This is my space and no one is going to screw that up?"
"Absolutely. But I wasn't able to conduct a fully rounded relationship. You could go and fuck people but you couldn't conduct a loving relationship. For years I had a huge problem making love with someone I loved. I couldn't put love and sex together. For a long time."
How long?
"Till I was 33!" she says, laughing. But, as an adult, does Sinead have a deeper understanding of her mother's distress, pain?
"I've always had massive compassion for my mother but there is a lot of hatred directed at her. I adored my mother. And believe what she suffered from was that she was trying to get attention for herself by hurting us. She was out of her mind, crazy. And to those who say these tales of abuse aren't true, the judgement is there in Alan Shatter's Family Law book, where it states my mother was so violent that me, my brothers and sister were given to my father. Things were that bad. Your life was spent trying not to be beaten up. If you scratched your plate, you'd get a punch in the face."
What would Sinead's dad do if he saw her get a punch in the face?
"She would do it while my father wasn't there because he'd go mad if he saw that happening. I don't think he knew the extent of what was going on. But the man did, genuinely, do his best and fought for custody once he knew the extent of the violence. My father is one of my best friends now, yet for years I felt very angry towards him. But he has since explained he was supposed to have us for four months every year but she wouldn't let him. We didn't know that. So, basically, while I felt he wasn't around, I now see he was trying all the time."
Has Sinead, similarly, taken a revisionist view of her mother? Do good memories now balance out bad?
"No. There are certain abusers of children who do not redeem themselves. She was a very sick woman."
So does Sinead believe her mother got her "karmic come-uppance" when she was killed in a car crash in 1985?
"I think, thanks be to God, she was released from what must have been agony. For her."
And her family?
"That is how we all felt about it. That it was a release for us. Because if she was alive we'd all be in the loony bin."
Feeling a sense of release when your mother dies might also fire feelings of guilt. Was that the case with Sinead?
"No. Because she was a monster. And you would want a monster out of your life. So we were all extremely relieved. Some of us were sad. Not everyone. But myself and my little brother were broken-hearted."
Had Sinead made peace with her mother before that car crash?
"Two months before she died we went to a St Stephen's Day party and my mother treated my sister like shit and I pulled my mother up about that, so we didn't speak to each other again."
Leaving much unresolved?
"Until I was 30 I was in grief about the death of my mother, feeling nothing would be resolved."
Does Sinead forgive her mother?
"Absolutely."
What about her dad?
"A lot of what I've done has been out of concern for my father because I think he has been more hurt than anyone. And my father doesn't feel threatened by my love for my mother. He's astonished I have the capacity to love. My mother had no capacity to love, so my father finds great relief in knowing I do. In other words, I'm not like her."
Indeed, this quest to identify herself as different from her mother may be the single most definitive feature of Sinead O'Connor.
"That, too, is my life's mission. That's why I shaved my head for years! Because I don't want to look like my mother. Everything I do I want to do as the opposite to what my mother did."
Including the way she treats her own children, presumably?
"The judgement in Alan Shatter's book says the kind of abuse I had undergone would leave me emotionally disturbed as I got older. Which it did. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't be a good mother. Yet a lot of people believe those who are abused don't make good parents".
Legal restrictions, as I said, mean Sinead cannot discuss the details of the custody case other than to say that she and John Waters amicably agreed a joint custody order in respect of their child. But what I can say, personally, as someone who witnessed the undeniable warmth and affection between Sinead O'Connor and her son Jake, when both turned up for Sinead's slot in my RTÉ series Under the Influence, and the similar sense of closeness when I meet her and the "deliriously happy" Roisin shopping on Grafton Street is that whatever about Sinead being "the physical embodiment of the effects of child abuse" she clearly is the embodiment of a parent who loves her children. This fact, too, became painfully apparent during countless, sometimes heated, emails Sinead and I exchanged after this interview, when her primary concern seemed to be that she "say nothing that might damage my kids".
But let's get back to the interview itself. Sitting in her apartment on a January afternoon Sinead may be speaking calmly but admits the custody case pushed her "over the edge" and was "terribly traumatic ...
"Some people were delighted to see Sinead O'Connor in the box."
So the year 2000 probably was the lowest point in Sinead's life?
"Yeah, but I see those things as blessings, like you say, a baptism of fire. And I do feel it was a baptism because I managed to find great gifts out of going through that. Like various people who were friends but I didn't realise were angels. The fact that I'm now back living in Ireland though I miss Jake. He chose to stay with his dad in London."
As both the product of a broken family and the survivor of a broken marriage herself, Sinead, understandably, is dubious about marriage. She's currently living with journalist Dermott Hayes.
"I would be happy living with someone for the rest of my life. Like I'm happy living with Dermott. But if we married it'd fuck my head up. Marriage is something people used to have to do so they could have sex! And live together. You don't have to do that any more. And I don't have to have babies with the same man, if I don't want to. If you fall in love with someone and want to stay with that person for the rest of your life, great, but why bother with marriage? Marriage is a defunct state."
Does Sinead want another child?
"I'd love to have another child," she says emphatically. "I've been broody for the past few months. I like being pregnant, like having babies. They're funny and they love you, no matter what you're like. But I'm not ready to have one."
That said, now that she has finally stepped beyond the shadows that threatened totally to envelop her recent life, Sinead O'Connor says she is "more content" than she has been for years.
"Being able to hang out with my family and friends and live a semi-normal life in Ireland has added, greatly, to that feeling of contentment. And even though Faith and Courage was recorded while I was going through the court case the abiding feeling on the album is one of spiritual growth and strength. And that, to me, is a perfect end to the story because, musically, my goal always was to make records that were spiritually uplifting without being corny. I want to be a healer as a musician, more than anything else. My hope always was that, as I got older, I'd use my experience to be involved in the healing process. For myself and, ultimately, other people, regarding child abuse."
At this point Sinead and I focus on those songs that "show someone trying to recover her spirit then turn into somebody who can help other people recover theirs". Space restrictions mean I can merely list some of those song titles. Troy, Jackie, Nothing Compares 2 U, Fire on Babylon, In This Heart, I Am Enough for Myself.
Most if not all of the songs Sinead picks relate to her mother. Particularly The Grief Song, which is "basically me understanding that what's wrong with me is that my mother is dead," she says. Likewise This Is to Mother You she describes as "my soul telling me 'you need mothering, you are so angry because you haven't got a mother and must, in the end, become your own mother. And then become a universal mother to other people.' That's why I call myself a priestess, in the ancient sense of the word, rather than a priest."
But as a "universal mother" and even "Rasta woman" why did Sinead become a "priest" in the less-than-female-friendly Catholic Church, of all religions?
"Because becoming a Catholic priest is, partly, an act of fuck-ery on my behalf, against the Vatican and the fact that the Catholic Church dares to tell us women we can't become priests. Why do we sit around moaning, saying 'men won't let us become priests?' Fuck them! I am a priest, or priestess, and I do want to work particularly in the area of death, dying, bereavement. And administer to those people who, like women, feel excluded by the Catholic Church. Such as gays. Anyone I can help heal."
ALL OF which leads to the perfectly titled Faith and Courage. "It, too, reflects my belief in the healing power of music. What Doesn't Belong to Me is powerful because it's me talking to the media about the effects of what they did to me. Emma is important because it's about forgiveness. And about John Waters and me. It's a love song. Yet in terms of spiritual development you can't really single out any song from Faith and Courage because they are all tied together. But If You Ever is about my mother and would sum a lot up. Part of my journey has been towards compassion and trying to love, despite what anyone does to you. Media people or your mother. Or what you do to yourself. The aim should be to love everyone. Including yourself. To love is all I ever wanted to do. And if I was angry it was because I wasn't taught to."
Not surprisingly, Sinead O'Connor ends our interview by returning to the subject of her late mother.
"I have this repeated dream where myself and my father, brothers and sisters end up going on holiday to a Martello-type tower," she says, suddenly sounding more like a child than at any point during the past two hours. "And the family are all in the sea and she comes to the shore and asks us to get out and talk to her. And the others don't want to. I'm the only one who does. So I have a little talk with her on the beach and then get back in and go swimming with the family." Sinead pauses, stubs her last cigarette. "I really miss my mother. Always will. I can't wait to see her again. It's my life's goal. And I know that when I do see her wherever the fuck it is we all go when we die I'll jump on her, with love and gratitude, and never let go."
And that, friends, is Sinead O'Connor.
