Most of us southside girls, circa 1962-1967, have a severe problem with Sinead O'Connor. A batch of us went into school, packed into our nasty uniforms, like bulbs in those grow-your-own hyacinth pots they used to sell in supermarkets. Time passed. We bloomed. We looked all right. But one of the hyacinths turned out to be a rare orchid in disguise, and she was called Sinead.
Fast-forward to this weekend, and I am firmly ensconced in the few seats they've put out for the infirm and elderly in the Big Top in Fisheries Field in Galway. I'm in the kind of company where three women impale themselves on each other's hand-bags in the squabble over who should buy the drinks, and then buy two Ballygowans. And when Sinead comes on stage, though the kids at the front roar and scream, the effect is like seeing her grow back into her pot again. She's just a brown-haired young woman in black jeans and a halter-top.
"She's very small, isn't she? She's very skinny-looking."
The sound-system in the Big Top drowns her beautiful voice. The best songs are covers or traditional: She Moved Through The Fair, Redemption Song. A lot of her own songs are musically weak, and some have dodgy lyrics: "How come you've never said you loved me, Englishman", etc. But, judging by the number of bubble-tummies around, she has touched a nerve with her songs about pregnancy and childbirth. None of the other gigs in the Galway Arts Festival's Big Day In, not even today's answer to "Hey, hey we're the Monkees", Ocean Colour Scene, or the fabulous funky country of Alabama 3, came close to it.
And she has assembled a fabulous choir of women's voices in The Screaming Orphans. They look like they've escaped, complete with at least one centre parting, from the funky 1970s; Sinead can get no further down to earth than this. Their native Bundoran has seen little of the four Diver sisters since April, when they started singing with Sinead, and touring: "We've been to Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Spain, France, the East Coast of the US . . . " Grainne Diver is breathless. After London, it's off to the West Coast of the US and Canada.
What has it been like? "She's a fifth sister, really," enthuses Grainne. "I would class her as a fifth sister." And why is she so into them? "Coz we're great," says Joan. "Ah, Joan, Joan, stop that. We blend well with her. We're four of us sisters, and we do blend. We're Irish, she's Irish, our voices are soft."
"No. We're great."
"We've learned to sing with her, coz she's an immense singer. She sings as well at eight in the morning as any time."
The Orphans now have a deal with Blue Mountain, along with U2 and Bob Marley. It's all seemed like Fate, really.
"We were used to the road since we were children, when we toured playing traditional music with our mother and father. Our mother used to sing Beautiful Bundoran, it was written for her, and Sinead sang it on The Butcher Boy. It's unreal, coz it's Mammy's song . . . "
