The Gazette (Montreal)
May 3, 1993, Monday, FINAL EDITION

'I fit in here,' Sinead O'Connor says of her return to Dublin

MAGGIE O'KANE; THE GUARDIAN


   The photographer was given 30 seconds. Before he could dip his hand into his
bag for the second lens, Sinead O'Connor had turned on her heel and was back in
the door of the Parnell School of Music. "Right, that's it," she said. "I'm not
into all this photo session crap," she had announced earlier.

   Mid-afternoon and she has just finished her singing lesson. Sinead O'Connor,
the woman who put her voice to an obscure Prince song, Nothing Compares 2 U, and
soared to the top of deejays' playlists around the world, is back in her home
town of Dublin learning how to sing and "trying to get sane."

   She came home, she says, "losing her mind" after nine years of selfenforced
exile in the international rock world. Home to be in a town where her sister
lives up the road. Where she can meet her father for lunch. Where people think
it's quite nice that she is a rock star but don't bother too much.

   Raising 6-year-old son

   As she is driving through the trees toward the centre of Dublin in her
slightly battered red BMW, Bob Dylan is playing on the tape and the jaw of a
young man dips as he recognizes her driving past his bus stop. Along the
pedestrian walkways of Grafton St. they all recognize her, a thin, beautiful
woman in a messy lilac T-shirt and training shoes, but they leave her alone.

   O'Connor intends to stay in Dublin for a long time, to bring up her
6-year-old son Jake and to pick up where she left off. A 17- year-old who ran
away to London to be in a band and escape her now famous abused childhood. At 26
she is back. "I fit in here. I have a sense of myself here, old ladies give me
holy medals and flowers. The paper boy gives me a free paper and Ireland is just
a much more loving place."

   She has divided the last nine years of her life between London and Los
Angeles and now wonders why. Home is a rented, detached house in a comfortable,
uncomplicated suburb of Dublin.

   An easy target

   She chose Sandymount to be near to her sister Eimear and insists on dragging
the Hoover thoroughly around her front room before sitting down to talk. On her
kitchen wall two squares of yellow paper urge her to "think positive." She
perches on top of the fake- walnut breakfast counter with her arms wrapped
tightly around her legs. You get the impression that she is waiting to be
bitten. Interviews have never been good for O'Connor. She is an easy target.

   O'Connor admits to seriously contemplating suicide and sees a therapist "on
and off." Her main therapy now, she says, is her singing lessons at the Parnell
School under the guidance of a man called Frank Merriman - "the most amazing
teacher in the universe."

   In her unremarkable house there are no Grammy Awards stacked on the
mantlepiece and no pictures of the bald, green-eyed beauty in her high days of
rock'n'roll. "I never really enjoyed all that scene. OK, it was great dressing
up and all that, but I was a screwed-up kid who had run away from an unhappy,
abused childhood and I never got the chance to sort myself out."

   In the morning she takes her son to school, goes to her singing classes where
her father, who wanted to be an opera singer, turns up most evenings for his own
tuition. "Then I come home, make Jake his tea, bath him, wash his face and teeth
and put him to bed. Being here is giving me a chance to be his mother. I
tormented myself that he was suffering with this rock-star life."

   She approaches her pet subject, child abuse, with the zeal of a missionary
looking for a death-bed conversion. In all her interviews she tolerates
questions on her records, her private life, her success so she can get the
chance to publicize her deeply- held belief that child abuse is the "root of all
evil in the world."

   Attempts to nudge the interview on to Dublin/sex/music/men are met with an
insistence on gnawing at the same bone. Just before deadline on Friday she rings
again. "Another thing - I tore up the pope's picture to draw attention to the
issue of child abuse that the Vatican ignores," she says. But doesn't
controversy sell records? "Ask my record company. I never ever did any of that
stuff to make money."

   Chris Hill of Ensign Records confirms that after the pope incident sales of
her records virtually ground to a halt. "We didn't keep daily figures but sales
fell dramatically, particularly in America. She doesn't see success in terms of
sales figures. She refused the Grammy Award for Nothing Compares 2 U because the
awards were too commercial. The industry side of this business reacts badly to
people who don't play the game. She was the first person ever not to take a
Grammy."

   Rich? Yes, she is rich. The industry puts her worth at around $ 1 million. "I
have enough money to have freedom," is all she will say. She says she wants to
sit back and take a more considered approach to life: "I have to be careful what
I say. I don't want to keep getting myself into trouble by saying things I have
not thought out properly." But she does.

   When she returned to Ireland at Christmas she was a wreck. Chris Hill says
they were seriously worried by her mental state. She appeared on Pat Kenny's
weekly TV chat show scratching and fidgeting her way through an interview where
she told Ireland's Saturday-night viewing public that she tore up a picture of
the pope because she was bored, that as a race they were suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder.

   An emotional mess

   Born the third of four children, her home was in middle-class Dublin.
Financially secure but an emotional mess, her parents separated when she was 8
and she was brought up by her mother, a desperately unhappy alcoholic,
tranquillized mother who beat her. O'Connor told her biographer Dermot Hayes:
"She was emotionally unstable and all the family were victims of her illness."
She died in 1985.

   In August, O'Connor left for London. Her father had sent her to a liberal
Quaker boarding school after she had served 18 months' detention for
shoplifting. But when she ran away from there and headed for England, he gave
up.

   Her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, was full of cathartic angst, grief
for her mother, anger and brutally frank admission of her own sexual and
emotional needs.

   Those needs are still unfulfilled. "Yes, I'd like a partner, a good
relationship with a man because it is lonely and I do want him to come along.
But so far it has not happened. But that is OK. Now it is about looking after
Jake and settling myself."

   Expression of anger

   She feels she should have come home two years ago when she found herself
isolated and lost. A 24-year-old big star living in Los Angeles with nobody to
talk to. "I never wanted to be part of the scene there. It was too f-ed up. I
was naive. The men that I met there were either interested in going out with a
rock star or were after my money. But it took me time to find that out and there
were difficult situations."

   Her head is no longer bald. "I shaved my head because I was an angry
screwed-up child. It was an expression of my anger and I wanted to shave my hair
off and go out there and scream." Now, she says, "I'm growing my hair. I am
still a child and I am still trying to grow up but that doesn't mean that I'm
going to shut up."