Lessons from Sinéad O’Connor’s Life and Death

Washington Watch

August 14, 2023

Dr. James J. Zogby © 

President 

Arab American Institute

In the days that passed between the death and burial of Sinéad O’Connor, there was an outpouring of praise for the Irish singer. News accounts and op-eds in major media in the US and Ireland made note of her courageous and prophetic voice. If there is a lesson to be learned from Sinéad’s life and the reactions to her passing, it is the importance of calling institutions and nations to account for past sins and the benefits that can accrue to future generations when such a reckoning occurs.  

While the many causes for which Sinéad fiercely advocated had a single common denominator—all were borne of her concern with injustice—she is best remembered for an appearance on national television ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II while admonishing the audience “to fight the real enemy.” Some saw her action as unforgivable. The incident haunted her and for a time derailed her career, but not for her many fans in Ireland.  

Ireland, a largely Catholic country, understood Sinéad’s anger. My wife Eileen was deeply attached to her Irish heritage and her Catholic faith. We were frequent visitors to the Emerald Isle and were there in the early 1990s when the newspapers were filled with stories about the Magdalene laundries, the homes to which “delinquent children” and pregnant unwed women were sent and subjected to abuse and forced servitude. The expectant mothers worked until their babies were born and taken from them.  

The Irish press carried pages of photos and interviews with women detailing the abuse they endured and the pain of their loss. Also revealed were stories of mothers who died in childbirth and babies who perished (6,000 in all) and were interred in mass graves. These reports were compounded by extensive reports of sexual abuse by clergy.  

Because Sinéad, at the age of 14, had been charged with theft and sentenced to a year and a half in a Magdalene laundry, she knew firsthand the indignity of this incarceration. As the Irish media and political leaders would not let the matter rest, posting stories and editorials and statements by elected officials, many Catholics came to share her rage. The Catholic Church in Ireland was held accountable for its past and continues to be humbled by this reckoning.  

While Sinéad’s legacy of demanding accountability for past injustices was being honored, one could not help contrasting it with recent news stories in the US showing American politicians and US Catholic bishops not only refusing to acknowledge their country’s and church’s past, but also seeking to erase it. 

For example, Republican governors and other elected officials in Florida, Texas, and Virginia are demanding changes in the way America’s deplorable history of slavery and racism is taught in schools. In a crass effort to “whitewash” slavery, that institution is being portrayed as a time in which some blacks learned skills that benefited them post-slavery. Eliminated are a detailed accounting of the horrors of Jim Crow segregation and the mass lynchings that took thousands of lives. They want a guilt-free past with no accountability.  

Nor is sexual abuse a stranger to the US Catholic Church (or, for that matter, US Protestant denominations or Jewish institutions). Shocking stories of widespread abuse continue to be reported, in dribs and drabs, and soon forgotten, because religious leaders coalesce to sweep their problems away to “protect their institutions.” Or they work to change the subject by asserting that the “real problems” are abortion or gay marriage.  

While Ireland and its church have been forced to come to terms with the past, America and its institutions have never fully come to terms with their sins and are moving in the opposite direction.  

Contrast the shameful coverups of the US bishops with Pope Francis’ apology to Canada’s indigenous peoples for the church’s role in erasing their history and culture or Pope Francis’ recent meeting with victims of clergy abuse in Portugal. 

Compare this acknowledgment and apology with America’s failure to own up to its crimes of genocide and slavery. This refusal to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the injustices of our past has led my compatriots and co-religionists to insist on our collective innocence while making delusional claims of virtue. It’s become a habit we can’t break—with consequences for our present and future behaviors.  

America is the only nation to use nuclear weapons—and we did so without telling the Japanese about the long-term impact of radiation on civilians who years later continued to suffer from radioactive poisoning. We dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, making victims of millions of innocents. And as late as the last decade, we freely used gross forms of torture as a weapon to extract information from prisoners and tried to justify this practice with shockingly detailed “legal memos” written by Bush administration officials.  

Despite this sordid history, we continue to maintain our claims of innocence and our right to be the standard-bearers of virtue. This sense of impunity is what comes from never being forced to reckon with our past, as the Irish and the Irish Catholic Church were forced to reckon with theirs. 

This, then, is the lesson from Sinéad O’Connor’s life and death: the importance of calling nations and institutions to accept responsibility for their pasts, and the humility and the possibility of changed behavior that can accompany this acknowledgment.