Fintan O’Toole: Sinéad O’Connor’s honesty was a curse for her but a blessing for us

Sinéad O’Connor lived in different places, but her second home was St Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. Her remarkable memoir Rememberings is dedicated “with love to all staff and patients at St Patrick’s University Hospital, Dublin”.

It was a place in which she found, in the way the word was originally intended, asylum. “I get to call it a nuthouse because I’m a nut. No one else gets to call it that.”

It seems apt that St Patrick’s was founded by another Irish artist who sometimes stirred outrage and who was often (wrongly) declared to be mad. The great satirist Jonathan Swift explained his motives for leaving in his will the funds for its establishment in 1746: “He gave what little wealth he had/ To build a house for fools and mad/ And showed with one satiric touch/ No nation needed it so much.”

Swift was hoping to remove the stigma and superstition that had always surrounded mental illness. He knew how thin is the line between sanity and madness.

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Yet, maybe because that borderline is especially thin in Ireland, it was subsequently patrolled and policed with particular vigour and cruelty. No nation on Earth has ever locked up a larger proportion of its population in mental hospitals than Ireland had by the 1950s. It was a way of shutting people up in both senses – physically confining them behind high walls, often in conditions of abject misery and powerlessness but also stopping them from talking. The voices of those who heard voices could not be heard.

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We had our own Catch 22: if you had been abused and traumatised, you were probably half-cracked and since you were half-cracked, who could believe you when you claimed you were abused? It was a perfect circle of denial.

Sinéad O’Connor was never sure why she suffered mental illness for so much of her life. Sometimes, she traced its origins to the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a mother who was herself very unwell mentally.

While so much is made of the moment when she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992, it is easily forgotten that this was not just any photo of the pope. It was the picture of John Paul that hung on her mother’s bedroom wall. It’s not hard to see how deeply intertwined were her political rage and her personal hurt.

But at the end of Rememberings, she seemed to opt for a purely genetic explanation for her condition, to conclude that she was “born bonkers” and “would have been as nutty as a fuckin’ fruitcake and as crazy as a loon even if she’d had St Joseph and the Virgin Mary for parents and grown up in the Little House on the Prairie”.

Maybe, like the princess in the fairytale who is given at birth the gifts of stunning beauty and overwhelming talent, there was indeed a genetic bad fairy who cursed her in the cradle, just to balance things out.

Whatever the mix of cruel nature and bad nurture, however, the fact is that like hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and hundreds of millions around the world, she suffered the torments of mental illness. The difference was that she had to do it in public.

It may be small consolation but the public part was a kind of progress. In previous generations, she would have been locked away and silenced, probably for good.

Just a few weeks before Sinéad O’Connor died, a plaque commemorating another brilliantly gifted woman, Lucia Joyce, was placed on the grave of her parents, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, in Zurich. She died in 1982 in the mental hospital in England where she had lived since 1951.

For O’Connor, the fame she could not escape meant that her mental health crises were sometimes exploited by media. But if that openness could be a curse for her, it was a blessing for many others who could see themselves in her. “My audiences”, as she wrote, “seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.”

Remembering Sinéad O’Connor

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She had a hard time being who she was, but she retained the courage to be it. It was no less important for people coping with the long aftermath of trauma or haunted by mental illnesses to be able to see one of their own as a public figure than it was for LGBTQ people to be able to do the same thing.

She did not romanticise mental illness, but she did not hide it either. When she lost her marbles, she picked them up again: “The thing being that after losing them, one finds them and plays the game better.” Perhaps it was a game that could never be won, but it mattered deeply that she kept trying to play it with passion, humour, beauty and purpose.

It mattered all the more in a society that had been so profoundly committed to hiding and silencing its awkward and unwanted people. It was vital to have a presence that was awkward but wanted so much and will be terribly missed. No nation needed it so much.