A crowd of more than 50 people gathered at the Irish Music Wall of Fame in Temple Bar, Dublin, to pay tribute to musician and activist Sinéad O’Connor on Thursday evening. Locals and fans spoke about why O’Connor was important to them as they sang along to songs such as Black Boys on Mopeds.
Many cited how she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live on US television in 1992 in protest at child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church as an inspiration.
“She spoke up, she spoke loud, and she spoke proud, and she never apologised for it,” said Lynn Collins (25) who described O’Connor’s death as “truly a heartbreaking loss”.
What spoke to Collins most about O’Connor was how she carried herself in the face of media and public criticism. “She refused to go with the flow, she challenged everything, it’s an inspiration to anybody who heard her,” she said.
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Collins said that the Dublin singer was “the epitome of what it means to be Irish” by standing up for the causes she believed in. “We always speak up and speak about things that aren’t right,” she said.
Katia Hancke (51) said she was attending the gathering to remember O’Connor because “it’s important to see her the activist and incredible artist that she was.”
“Her music was a bit of a music soundtrack to my life. I’m similar to her age so I grew up with her music.”
Moving to Ireland from Belgium, Katia said that O’Connor brought light to the issues of the Catholic Church in Ireland. “She named those issues in the early 90s, it was really important. At the time she was really pilloried for it,” she said. “I think it is really important to bring the real warrior that she was to light.”
Sorcha Hackett (39) from Rialto recalled her first memories of Sinéad O’Connor. “When I was six, I remembered screaming crying to my mam asking could I shave my head when Nothing Compares 2 U came out. I had never heard anything like her, I was just blown away and I was obsessed straight away!”
O’Connor was more than just a musician to the Rialto native. “More than her music it is her protest, it is how she used her voice so strongly to speak up for the people that were unheard and to fight against a very oppressive state that she could see with her eyes. People disagreed with her at the time, but she was telling the truth.”
Hackett said that the renowned musician was ahead of her time and that the criticisms she had of society “are now the norms and most people would now agree with what she was saying in the early 90s but she was vilified for it at the time”.
