Do we like them?

Do we like Sinéad O'Connor?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Her record is on the side of survivors, refugees and LGBTQ+ people, with one retracted public claim and a couple of legal stoushes the only marks.

Sinéad O'Connor was the third of five kids in a Dublin family whose parents split in 1976. At 15, after repeated shoplifting and truancy, she spent 18 months at a training centre on the grounds of a Magdalene laundry. Out of that came a young woman with a shaved head and a voice that could stop a room, and a debut album in 1987.

Her defining moment came in 1992 on Saturday Night Live, when she sang Bob Marley's “War” unaccompanied, tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II and told the audience to “Fight the real enemy.” It was a protest against child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The backlash was savage: she was booed at Madison Square Garden and a crowd steamrollered her records in New York. Years on, a Fordham theologian and a survivors' network leader called her protest prophetic, and she said she had no regrets.

On the harm test, we found nothing harmful in her own words or acts. In 1988 she performed at Pride when few artists would, and in 1990 she contributed a track to an AIDS fundraising album. In 2017 her management reportedly asked whether she could donate her wardrobe to a trans-support charity, and she wore a rainbow top on British breakfast TV in 2019. She also dedicated her final award to Ireland's refugee community.

The good-person side has a couple of marks. In 2016 comedian Arsenio Hall sued her for libel over Facebook posts in which she accused him of supplying Prince with drugs. In February 2017 she said she “retract[ed] them unequivocally” and apologised, and the suit was dropped. Separately, her former manager sued her in Ireland alleging breach of contract and defamation; she denied it, and the case settled in 2019 with no terms disclosed.

On faith, she asked in an open letter in 2018 to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and two months later converted to Islam. Faith alone is never a mark against anyone here, and nothing in her record suggests she used it to push harm onto others. Nothing new has turned up on her lately: she died on 26 July 2023, aged 56.

The real stuff is that she kept speaking when it cost her. She was blacklisted from American TV after the SNL stoush, and she stuck with causes for women, abuse survivors, refugees and queer people long after the cameras left. Women's Aid Ireland said she challenged an Ireland that stifled women, children and anyone who didn't conform.