A bold and courageous legacy

In 1990, Sinead O'Connor rocketed to the top of US charts with her cover of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U. Two years later, she infamously tore a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live while performing Bob Marley's War a cappella, denunciating paedophilia in the Catholic Church and standing in solidarity with survivors. She was 25 years old. Instead of being lauded for her bravery in breaking an international silencing of abuses perpetuated and hidden by the Catholic Church, she was demonised, particularly in the United States. 

Kathryn Ferguson's film concentrates on Sinead's life between 1987 and 1993. To place these years in context, public conversations about abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church were only beginning to occur in Ireland, as a nation was forced to confront the legacy of a State-Church axis established after Irish independence from British Rule in 1922.  The first major public scandal occurred in 1994 when Fr Brendan Smith was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of children in Northern Ireland, followed by the first victim of clerical child sex abuse (Andrew Madden) speaking publicly about his experiences of abuse in 1995. Notably, Sinead O'Connor's tearing of the Pope's picture took place in 1992, before these scandals were public knowledge. Her passionate activism was a solo act. 

Ferguson's film remains committed to the seven-year period leading up to the SNL appearance, highlighting Sinead's childhood; the cruel treatment by her religious mother, and her incarceration at a Magdalene Laundry. Interviews with Sinead O'Connor are accompanied by a range of voiceovers from her first husband (Chuck D.) and former producer (John Reynolds), amongst others, which are interwoven with archival footage. 

Nothing Compares has the benefit of hindsight via a contemporary feminist lens. We are now able to understand the significance of Sinead's bravery in the face of society's silencing and ridicule. We now recognise how 'right' Sinead was. I have been studying Ireland's history of institutional abuse for many years, and it is the trans-generational trauma embedded in Irish culture that resonates in the film. The backlash of abuse Sinead O'Connor received for shining a light on the hypocrisy of the role of the Catholic Church in Irish daily life was deeply uncomfortable to watch, reflecting Irish society's profound sense of cognitive dissonance in how Sinead O'Connor was treated and what our present knowledge of the Catholic Church and the abuse people experienced in its name. This sense of shame is a difficult foe as Irish society works to come to terms with a difficult and contested past.

I am left at the end of the film with a sense of Sinead's boldness – not only literally in the sense of her courage, but in the Irish colloquial sense as a term for a 'bad' child. This characterisation has had an impact throughout Sinead's life. She wielded her voice and platform with such conviction against a tidal wave of resistance to her speaking truth to power, and that legacy is most certainly a bold and courageous one.

 Aptly, Nothing Compares to Sinead, and the final words are hers: 'They tried to bury me. They didn't realise I was a seed.'

Reviewed by Dr Jennifer O'Mahoney, Lecturer in Psychology, South East Technological University