I Will Live By My Own Policies.

My hero, Sinead.

I was 8 years old, sitting in the back of my mother’s car, when I first heard her. A well worn tape of Lion and the Cobra blaring through the car radio. Sinead’s howl, to me even then as a girl, sounded as a warning of what was to come. The dangers of being a woman. And worse, a truthful one. Sinead who described herself as “trouble” taught me early on about the value of breaking the rules. Three years later, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got would join the Lion and the Cobra in the etchings on my heart. From then on when Sinead sang, I took notes.  

I was 13 when I watched, as the world did, her showing us the consequences of bravery. I  wondered over the years what went through her mind that night backstage at Saturday Night Live. Did she secretly carry the picture with her all day? Did she fizz with fear before she pulled it out? What did it feel like to tear up the image of the pope in front of millions of people?  “Fight the real enemy,” she said but in the end it was her that was vilified. Her raw authenticity met with dismissal, discarded as nothing but crazy. A mantle she’d carry for the rest of her life. That would never stop her, though. Not our Sinead. Braver than the lot of us all put together one Dublin girl sacrificed her life for exposing the horrors of the status quo. She screamed the truth before many of us could even whisper it to ourselves. And in years to come the world would learn that Crazy Sinead was right. She was right about it all. 

Challenging what a woman is, Sinead was full of anger and desire. She actively revoked her born beauty. She was changeable and vulnerable and unafraid. It was spectacular. Her trauma was immense and unimaginable. It broke her, but she let us see the cracks. Abuse, especially in Ireland, lived only in the shadows, surfacing only in us all as poisonous shame. Sinead, sacred as she was, took that abuse into the daylight, showing us all where shame is born. Sinead’s demons were not her own but real living monsters masked as saviours. Her battle was not with herself but with the grotesque injustices she faced. 

Her music soared into the most delicate layers of being a woman. Of being a mother. The power of her sharing her pain, our pain, shaped a generation of women. Her cry, our cry. Sacred she was, a word I think she’d like to be described as. Her songs are precious to me in a way that no other music is or can be ever again. They are my mother, my sister, my friends, my nation. The music has transcended time and space in my life. Those songs are me at 8 and 22 and 34 and now at 44. I wonder if she knew how we carried us with her every step of the way. They may have crucified her, but we never let her go. Her songs became more of a bible to me than the real one ever did.  

In 2002, in what now feels like a cosmic dream, I had the chance to work with Sinead on a radio special for RTE Radio 1 as part of the promotion for her Sean-Nós Nua album. She was as I suspected, magical. Funny and gentle. How could she be soft after everything that had happened? All that energy in just one woman. I could feel it all around her. She brought her daughter along to the recording and her mamminess surprised me- her love of her child so clear. She made me laugh and that made me want to cry. There she was, my hero, standing real, right in front of me. How could I find the words to tell her there in her human form, what she’d meant to me? I couldn’t and I didn’t, but I still wish that I had.  

We knew how special she was then and we know how special she is now. But we failed to truly recognise her brilliance and contributions to our culture when she was alive. We should have protected her more, told her to her face how precious she was. The magnitude of our love for her is pouring out now because we all know deep down that a person like Sinead comes but once. 

When she lost her son Shane, her ache was palpable. The groan of grief that can only come from losing your child. I cried that day her son died, as I cried today hearing that she was gone. We know now that she’s moved on, just how much she meant to us all and that we are unlikely to ever see the likes of her again.