DAILY MAIL (London) March 20, 1999 It went against every maternal instinct. Sinead O'Connor this week shocked Britain when she revealed she had given up her child. Here, she talks exclusively about the agony that led to such a terrible sacrifice David Jones AT MIDNIGHT on Mother's Day - a time she chose because it seemed so fitting - Sinead O'Connor packed all her three-year-old daughter's clothes into a big suitcase. Then she dispatched it to a house near her own in North London, where the girl and her father, John Waters, were spending the weekend. Driven, four days earlier, to attempt an overdose after Waters had made six specific allegations about her poor parenting to the police and social services - 'He even said I let Roisin be collected from school by my so-called drug-dealer, ' she sighs - Sinead could take no more. Accompanying the suitcase was a hastily scrawled note. In it, she informed her former lover that their long, emotionally draining custody battle was over, and he had won. He could take beautiful, dark-eyed Roisin to live with him in Dublin, as he had always wanted. She would even buy them a home, and pay for a nanny and school fees. Last Wednesday, when the news of her decision leaked out, the Irish singer - repeatedly accused of courting controversy for her own ends since emerging as a major pop talent 12 years ago found herself venomously criti-cised again. While Sinead, 32, sat up all night, chain-smoking and unable to sleep or eat, the chattering classes in Dublin were questioning her fitness to be a mother. There was also a somewhat gloating consensus that justice had been done: the rebel who once ripped up a photograph of the Pope on stage had gone too far and reaped her just deserts. FOR little Roisin (pronounced Row-sheen) was no ordinary child. She was conceived 'by arrangement', after her parents - who had known one another only a few days - agreed that they each wanted a baby but not marriage or even a lasting relationship. In view of Sinead's appallingly disturbed upbringing, not to mention two previous abortions - one of which, she admits, was carried out only a few weeks before she and Waters sealed their doomed pact - her involvement seems irresponsible to say the least. Some would say recklessly selfish. Yet at least her behaviour ran true to form. Less so that of bachelor Waters, a widely respected author and Irish Times writer in his early 40s. Despite his long, straggly hair and rock journalism background, colleagues depict him as a somewhat aloof, old-fashioned west coast Irishman. According to Sinead, he also has serious difficulty relating closely to people, particularly women. Waters, so effusive in his weekly newspaper columns - which have been preoccupied lately with the rights of fathers and that apparently great unspoken taboo, the abuse of men by their spouses flatly refuses to discuss the thorny matter of Roisin. As ever, Sinead is less reticent. But although she concedes to making a mistake, she scoffs at suggestions that she, or Waters, crossed the bounds of morality. 'There is nothing wrong with the way we brought our child into the world. I wouldn't do it again, not because it was immoral but because it was so stressful. This is what happens when you go around having babies with total strangers. It was the stupidest thing to do. At the same time, I want to make it really clear that I don't regret at all what we did. 'Roisin is an angel from heaven - one of the best things that has happened to me, and the very best that has ever happened to her father. If anyone saw her, they would know I'm right.' Sinead is hovering in the hallway of her large, cream-washed, detached house near Hampstead Heath. Despite the flattering newspaper photographs of her emerging the previous day from a charity recording session, she looks terrible. Alarmingly so. As a result of the wrangle over Roisin, she says, she has lost two stone, so that her emaciated frame barely fills her baggy, checked trousers and black cardigan. She also has a badly infected eye, which kept her in hospital until four that morning and has been crudely covered with a gauze patch stuck to her forehead with Sellotape. 'No sticking plaster,' she explains, nervously fidgeting with the dressing. Her complexion carries the pallor of sickness, her voice is low, her demeanour almost painfully intense. She speaks quickly, invariably ending her long, vivid sentences imploringly with: 'Do you know what I mean?' But she offers no pleasantries, no polite cups of tea or coffee. Her purpose, she makes it plain, is to tell her side of the vexed Roisin story, and in so doing 'to clear my name of the evil lies that have been spread about me'. The saga began almost four years ago in the aftermath of a messy affair which had left Sinead precariously close the edge. 'A week before I met John, I had broken up with a man who was very bad for me. He did a lot of drugs and he was nasty to my son (Jake, now aged 11). I was no longer prepared to have him around. 'But I had got pregnant accidentally and had a termination, and I was very upset. I've never told him (Waters) about that to this day.' Sinead had had her first abortion years earlier after another dead-end love affair. 'Abortion disturbs you very badly,' she says. 'I was in grief when I made the decision to have Roisin.' She met Waters after a song she released about the Irish famine was widely attacked. He was the only one to write positively about it, so she phoned him and they agreed to meet for an interview. 'I developed a large crush on him straight away. I think he's good-looking, but it wasn't just his looks. He has an aggressive side to him, but there's a side which is tender and gentle. I was very ill with depression and I needed that. 'I had no therapy at the time (she now attends five sessions a week and takes antidepressant tablets), and I was very much in need of tenderness. And he was quite a mature person. 'We did the interview, then met a few days later. It was then that I knew I wanted his lovechild. I admired him so much.' The following week, she sent him a note, a tactic she often uses to communicate difficult feelings. She did not mention her longing for a baby, but said that she wished to marry him. Waters's response, she says, was that he felt it unwise for them to start a romance because he was too messed up. 'I should have listened to him. But a lot of men do this, saying: "You shouldn't go out with me." So we were being friends. 'At this time he mentioned that he was very sorry that he hadn't had a child. A couple of times he'd wished he had, even if he wasn't with someone. And then I basically climbed into bed with him that night.' SINEAD was on a concert tour of Europe, she recalls. 'It's hard to pin down the actual details, but I think John and I spent four nights together as lovers. One or two in Prague and one or two in Dublin. No, we may have spent seven nights, spread over six weeks.' In any event, she says, their sex life was unsatisfactory. 'He's not very sensitive, doesn't like women and doesn't like sex. He thinks women are disgusting with their clothes off. I realised it would be sad (to marry) if we weren't making love. It's a weirdness that's quite common in middle-aged Irish men. 'Then, when I became pregnant, he couldn't have sex with me. Shortly after I got pregnant he said he'd had a dream about his mother sitting on his knee, like a lover, and couldn't deal with it.' Sinead seems confused when explaining how the decision to have a baby was made. 'We were very stupid,' she says, then adds: 'Well, we didn't take a decision as such. We talked about it, then I got into bed with the guy. I was in love with him, do you know what I mean? 'I don't believe that he was in love with me but if he didn't want it he would have got out of it. It was a decision we both made very romantically, idealistically. Then we were hit with the reality of what we had done.' Sinead's tour had progressed to Chicago, which was in the grip of a heatwave, when a pregnancy test proved positive. Suffering sickness and being 'volatile emotionally', Sinead immediately cancelled the rest of her schedule and flew home. It seems she envisaged cementing her relationship with Waters and spending her confinement with him, but their friendship quickly soured. 'We were so p****d off about what was being said about us in the papers and also so frightened. Plus the shock hit us. We were both so hurt and upset that we took it out on each other. 'The only people I've lost my temper with have been men. Anyway, he decided I was too much for him and he wanted nothing more to do with me from the time I was eight-weeks pregnant. It broke my heart. 'To this day, he says I abandoned him. That's bull****. I sent him letters and left messages on his answering machine. He kept only the angry ones, not the ones where I cried. He closed his heart and turned into stone, and that's so hurtful to a woman. Whatever I've done wrong, I didn't deserve that.' While she carried their baby, Sinead claims Waters was hatching what she melodramatically describes as a 'Rumpelstiltskin' plot to win custody. 'I knew he was going to try to take her away from me. He had a room converted for her at his house in Dublin, and as soon as she was born he spoke to her only in Irish, which excluded me.' Two days before the child was due, Waters turned up at Sinead's home. But two more weeks passed before the birth, so he stayed in a spare room and he and Sinead tried to patch up their differences. 'He said he wasn't sorry - I had been a monster and he knew no other way to deal with it.' AFTER a 12-hour labour, Brigidine Roisin arrived at 3.41pm on Sunday, March 10, 1996, at St Mary's Hospital, Pad-dington. Waters, who was present at the birth, stayed at Sinead's home until the following Wednesday, then booked into a bed and breakfast. 'He would call to see Roisin, but he would never look at me, much less kiss or hug me,' she says. 'I sat and cried all day long. There is nothing more hurtful than giving birth in front of a man when you know that man can't stand you and wants to take your child away. It's terrible.' Sinead has frequently spoken about her childhood traumas. In 1996, she upset her barrister father, John, and four siblings by relating on TV how her late mother, Marie, had mentally and physically tortured her. Her parents had parted acrimoniously and their court battle made legal history, with O'Connor becoming the first Irish father to be granted custody of his children. Waters obviously knew of this, and Sinead claims he cynically turned it to his advantage. 'In his summing up, the judge said my mother had abused me and this was bound to leave me emotionally disturbed long into adulthood. 'John used that against me. He took it to his lawyer and said it was proof that I am an unfit mother.' This was the opening salvo in an often unseemly custody fight that has simmered between London and Dublin for almost three years. 'John is very manipulative,' she says. 'The impression he wanted to create was that the kids were being raised in this rock 'n' roll lifestyle. 'Nothing could be further from the truth. I have deliberately created my life so that I don't end up like Tina Turner or Nina Simone, who, I have read, always regretted not spending more time with their children. 'If I'm recording, I work between 11am and 3pm so I can be there for them after school. My nanny has weekends off so I can look after them myself. I'm not very domestic and I'm a bad cook, but I'm home so much my friends think I'm boring. I have a boyfriend who has three kids, and we stay in and watch TV.' Looking around the house, it certainly appears warm and well kept. Everywhere there are photographs of both Roisin and Jake, whose father - Sinead's ex-husband and former backing drummer John Reynolds - remains a close friend. A recent spelling test, in which Jake scored 66 marks of 67, is pinned on the wall. Yes, the house is a little untidy, with a pile of videos and Jake's coat on the floor, but what family home isn't? CLEARLY, Camden council's social workers found everything in order. They visited twice and assured Sinead they would be taking no action. However, if she thought Waters was beaten, she was wrong. She claims to have proof that he planted stories about the investigation in the papers. But on February 5, after she had tried to hit back publicly, he won a gagging injunction in Dublin High Court preventing her from speaking about Roisin or him. Last week, at a further hearing, Sinead became so overwrought during a row with Waters in the court precincts that she spat in his face. The following day, when the judge announced that the injunction would be extended, she was not in court. She had swallowed 20 Valium tablets in her hotel room. 'I had sent a note saying I would kill myself and that I hoped I died. But it wasn't really a suicide attempt.' Sinead recovered quickly and, bizarrely, sat next to Waters on the flight back to London. As a peace offering at the airport, she even bought him a $30 'history of Ireland ring'. Worn out and afraid for her psychological health, she reluctantly agreed that she and Roisin would live in Dublin after all. When she told Jake, however, he became distraught and she knew she could not go through with the move. So, three days later, on Mothering Sunday, she began packing her daughter's belongings into a suitcase. Roisin is now living - permanently, it seems - with her father. Sinead says they will not formalise the arrangement, but adds that she has decided to sacrifice her right to custody to preserve her own sanity and, most importantly, so that Roisin will no longer be torn between her parents. She has not seen her daughter since handing her over to Waters, but plans to visit her next Friday and make weekend trips thereafter. Sinead has convinced herself that her baby-by-arrangement will suffer no long-term damage, and that, given time she, Jake, Roisin and Waters will become a happy, well-adjusted - albeit disparate family. After all that has gone on between them, it may seem unlikely. But as she fixes you with her good eye and reads out the sentimental messages on last year's Mother's Day cards, you hope she is proved right. But you can't help having the greatest of doubts.