“Nothing Compares 2 U“ Sinead O’Connor

She was named Sinéad after Sinéad de Valera, the mother of the doctor who presided over her delivery (Éamon de Valera, Jnr.), and Bernadette in honour of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. ^{She was the third of five children; an older brother is the novelist Joseph O’Connor Her parents were John Oliver “Seán” O’Connor, a structural engineer later turned barrister  and chairperson of the Divorce Action Group, and Johanna Marie O’Grady (1939–1985), who married in 1960 at the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, Drimnagh, Dublin. She attended Dominican College Sion Hill school in Blackrock, County Dublin.}

In her 2021 memoir, Rememberings, O’Connor wrote that she was regularly beaten by her mother, who also taught her to steal from the collection plate at Mass and from charity tins. ^{In 1979, at age 13, O’Connor went to live with her father, who had recently returned to Ireland after marrying Viola Margaret Suiter (née Cook) in Alexandria, Virginia, United States, in 1976.[26]}

At the age of 15, following her acts of shoplifting and truancy, O’Connor was placed for 18 months in a Magdalene asylum, the Grianán Training Centre in Drumcondra, ^{which was run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity.  She thrived in certain aspects, particularly in the development of her writing and music, but she chafed under the imposed conformity of the asylum, despite being given freedoms not granted to the other girls, such as attending an outside school and being allowed to listen to music, write songs, etc. For punishment, O’Connor described how “if you were bad, they sent you upstairs to sleep in the old folks’ home. You’re in there in the pitch black, you can smell the shit and the puke and everything, and these old women are moaning in their sleep  … I have never—and probably will never—experience such panic and terror and agony over anything.” She later attended Maryfield College in Drumcondra, and Newtown School in Waterford for fifth and sixth year as a boarder, but did not sit the Leaving Certificate in 1985.}

On 10 February 1985, when O’Connor was 18, her mother died in a car accident, aged 45, after losing control of her car on an icy road in Ballybrack and crashing into a bus. ^{In June 1993, O’Connor wrote a public letter in The Irish Times in which she asked people to “stop hurting” her: “If only I can fight off the voices of my parents / and gather a sense of self-esteem / Then I’ll be able to REALLY sing …” The letter repeated accusations of abuse by her parents as a child which O’Connor had made in interviews. Her brother Joseph defended their father to the newspaper but agreed regarding their mother’s “extreme and violent abuse, both emotional and physical”. That month, Sinéad said: “Our family is very messed up. We can’t communicate with each other. We are all in agony. I for one am in agony.”}

This shared song  was taken from the album ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’

CLICK  link to listen