This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on June 12th, 1993, in response to a poem that Sinéad O’Connor published in The Irish Times two days earlier, in the form of a full-page advertisement, after she was criticised for failing to appear at a Peace Together concert in Dublin the previous weekend
I know that I was not the only one who cried. I was not the only one who read Sinéad O’Connor’s poem on Thursday morning and whispered: “That’s me.”
“I find it hard to be myself. To show my feelings. To get to the joy I need to release the pain which is blocking me. If I don’t do this I will not survive. If I don’t do this I’ll never be the singer I am capable of being if only I can love myself. 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.”
You don’t have to have been abused as a child to identify with these lines. Sinéad’s bulletin from the heart cut to the quick of the human condition. It zoned in on the isolation which many of us feel beneath our masks of calm and control. Like a mischievous pamphleteer, Sinéad sent us an emotional letter-bomb, shattering our equilibrium and demanding that we look honestly at the deep feelings of abandonment, pain and sadness which so many of us keep repressed.
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Many dismissed her action as attention-seeking or as outrageously self-indulgent. “How dare she say that her voice is the only thing she puts before her son?” somebody asked. Many others simply shouted, “How dare she? Who does she think she is?”
Like a poet, she has terrified us by speaking the truth. And by criticising her family upbringing in public, she breaks the tremendously strong taboo against exposing family problems.
Sinéad’s explosion of emotion left me feeling skittery all day as my childhood insecurities and fears came bubbling to the surface. With Sinéad, I walked that fine line between rationality and irrationality. I wanted to jump in the car and drive to where she was and hug her. I wanted to tell her that she was not alone.
Out on the streets, in homes, shops and offices, everybody was talking about it. Many people were quite simply floored by this stunning expression of pain which dared to bring hurt in out of the shadows. Others were indignant at what they saw as a show of egotism.
“So what? We all feel like that. We don’t take out full-page ads in The Irish Times, somebody said, his voice rising in almost hysterical anger at Sinéad’s refusal to grow a callus over her pain.
Telephone callers to Marian Finucane’s Liveline programme on RTÉ Radio 1, on which Sinéad was a guest, were passionate in their reactions. One unemployed man who had saved money carefully to buy a ticket to the concert at which she failed to appear last Saturday night simply expressed bafflement and, perhaps, some subtle anger, as to how a young woman with so much money and talent couldn’t pull herself together long enough to keep to her commitments.
Many callers were supportive but many were angry and deeply threatened. One even seemed to believe that Sinéad’s poem was a form of social sabotage against Christian people and used Sinéad’s admission that she has consulted a psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Clare, as a weapon to insult her with.
“You’re not behaving like a Christian,” Sinéad told this particularly angry caller. “Christianity means unconditional love.”
Her point was unanswerable. And in handling the callers, Sinéad – so vulnerable on the one hand – was also inscrutable, affirming her convictions with all the passion of a saint headed for the stake. It is this dogmatic, preachy side of her which some people find hard to take.
Why does she outrage so many people? One reason may be that she breaks all the rules. Not only does she blast away our defences with words, she offends against the official system of self-expression. Many people seem to believe that it’s okay to bare your soul in a book or in a song – but not in a newspaper advertisement. Go straight to the people and express yourself? We’re not used to that. It upsets our breakfast.
Watching her “grow up” in public has been painful and occasionally shocking. She has been both admired for her openness and resented for her arrogance. She begs our sympathy by telling us that her behaviour is a cry of help from a lost child. Even knowing this, however, do we really want to know the details of her affairs?
Through her songs and most recently this poem, Sinéad keeps coming at us again and again with the same cry of irretrievable loss. It is a keening reflected in the spellbound faces of the young women who crowd her concerts, standing in rapt attention as she sings to them their story. This is Sinéad’s talent, to expose the wound, and she knows it, as she made clear during Marian Finucane’s programme.
Some of her language – her reference, for example to being an “adult child” – would be instantly recognisable to readers of the US psychologist and writer John Bradshaw, whose bestselling books centre on the theme of the lost “inner child”. Bradshaw is convincing in his belief that many families shame their children as a means of controlling them. When shamed often enough, children lose touch with themselves.
“Adult children are adults with a soul-murdered child living inside of them,” he writes. “The true self is ruptured and a false self must be created.” Bradshaw traces all compulsive/addictive behaviour – addiction to alcohol, drugs, sexuality, food, work and even fame and public attention – to this “poisonous pedagogy” of child-rearing, a tradition which “promotes ownership of our children”, “denial of feelings”, corporal punishment and the systematic breaking of children’s wills.
It is all sadly relevant to what is going on in Ireland today, when 50,000 children per year telephone Childline and when we know all too well that the Kilkenny incest case is but one example of the countless number of cases happening in every parish in the country. Many otherwise sensible and kind people still believe that slapping children is an acceptable form of discipline. Sinéad is right that abuse – to varying degrees – is carved deeply into generation after generation.
On one level, Sinéad O’Connor is asking us to stop denying and look at our demons. But how dare she be so presumptuous as to speak for us and for our pain? She has every right. It is the prerogative of the pamphleteer and, if you ask me, more people should do it.
Some people have challenged her sweeping diagnosis of the trouble in the world, her blaming all pain – including the Yugoslavian conflict – on child abuse. She does have backup for this view. Both Bradshaw and Dr Alice Miller, the psychoanalyst who invented the notion of the “poisonous pedagogy”, have convincingly argued that the greater social system and world events mirror what goes on within the family.
Sinéad feels the problems of the world on her shoulders. In a week when the news of atrocities from Yugoslavia has become so horrifying as to be beyond words, many of us are feeling the sorrow of the world on our shoulders too. The same day that her poem was published, News at One on RTÉ Radio 1 included a report of an “ethnically cleansed” mother who was repeatedly raped as her three-month-old baby cried. When she asked that her baby be brought to her breast to be fed, she was handed the baby’s head.
Such evil is beyond our capacity to understand.
In many ways a young singer has gone some way in articulating a collective cry of grief and dismay and powerlessness.
As for her own cry for help, we could run to Sinéad O’Connor and hug her and shower her with approval, but still the love would never be enough for her. Another person’s love won’t cure her. Christianity means unconditional love, yes. It means, in other words, forgiveness. If she was to come into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I’d say “Forgive those who hurt you, Sinéad, then you can start loving yourself.”
