Film director Kathryn Ferguson was in the audience at Electric Picnic recently when Fontaines D.C. came on stage to Sinéad O’Connor’s Troy.
The song and the album it came from, The Lion and the Cobra, was a soundtrack to her childhood growing up in Belfast during the Troubles in the late 1980s.
Her father Sean would play it in the car on wet miserable evenings as they drove through army checkpoints or during bomb scares.
“It was never off the stereo in the car. It was part of my early life,” she says. “It was an education.”
That education continued when the follow-up album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got came out in 1990.
“My friends and I in Northern Ireland couldn’t believe what we were hearing,” she says.
“Everything Sinéad spoke out against and how she looked and her music — all of it was so exciting. I loved what she stood for. Then there was a huge attack against Sinéad.”
It began on October 3, 1992, when O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, in a very public denunciation of paedophilia in the Catholic Church.
Two weeks later she was booed by the crowd at the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary concert. Frank Sinatra said he wanted to “kick her ass”.
“It had a huge effect on me as a young teenager to see this amazing female artist from our country being treated the way she was,” Ferguson says.
“You know, how this icon and idol of ours was very publicly taken down.”
That’s where the seeds were sown for Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares, which explores O’Connor’s rise and fall from grace between 1987 and 1993. “We wanted to look at it all through a contemporary feminist lens,” she says.
Of course, O’Connor told the truth about the Catholic Church.
And of course, Pope John Paul II apologised, nine long years later, for sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.
In 2018, Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the abuses suffered by victims in Ireland — but no one ever apologised to O’Connor for all she suffered for being right.
“Sinéad was right about so many things,” says Ferguson. “And everything that she was speaking out about at that time has obviously come full circle, which makes it all even more absurd viewing it through this contemporary lens. It is shocking.”
By speaking out, she says, O’Connor helped some people to heal.
“Absolutely she did. So many people have said how crucially important Sinéad O’Connor was to them as they were going through all sorts of different experiences.”
That sense of O’Connor’s impact was borne out by conversations she has had with people who have seen the film, which was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and has subsequently been shown at film festivals around the world.
“A lot of Irish people at those screenings see the Ireland that they also came from and how it was obviously a very tricky place to grow up in and break free from,” says Ferguson.
“I think a huge amount of Irish people feel that they also experienced similar things as Sinéad. That’s why we wanted to go back in the film to that Ireland.
“We wanted to look at that five-year period in Sinéad’s life, so we could set the foundation of the cause and effect of why she ripped up the picture of the Pope, because so many people in 1992 didn’t really understand why. That action left people a bit confused.
“We wanted in this film to look at why that happened. It wasn’t some random act of activism. It was very deeply rooted.
“I think it is a wider story of trans-generational trauma that is so engrained in Irish culture even today and we’re still reeling from it all.”
What did Ferguson learn from making the documentary?
“The media have done such a brilliant job over the years in painting her as someone who is issue-hopping. That was quite reductive of her voice. But having gone through hundreds of hours of video and TV interviews, you can see how consistent her voice and her message actually was. She is pretty rock solid on all the things she was speaking out against.
“What I also learned from going through hundreds of hours of film and video is the sheer level of [abuse] Sinéad received.”
Madonna, who might have been expected to be an ally of O’Connor’s, came out publicly against her, saying: “I think there’s a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people.”
Ferguson says: “It would be interesting to see what Madonna thinks about that today. I’m sure she’d think very differently. But everyone seemed to jump on this bandwagon against her. She was this young woman from Dublin who was causing this noise.
“They obviously deemed Sinéad powerful enough to make that much noise about her.”
What’s her legacy?
“She’s one of the boldest, bravest Irish women that’s ever lived. Her ability to use her voice and her power as she did has surely gone on — whether directly or indirectly — to inspire generations of young activists, young women, as well as musicians. Her legacy is quite profound.”