DUBLIN — The woman who tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live television in 1992 did so nearly a decade before the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis became a global headline. Sinéad O’Connor, who died July 26 at age 56, was not ahead of her time. She was simply present in her own time, and she spoke.
Born December 8, 1966, O’Connor released her debut album, *The Lion and the Cobra*, in 1987. It charted internationally. But it was her 1990 record, *I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got*, that shifted the ground. That album sold more than seven million copies worldwide. Its lead single, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” was named the top world single of the year at the Billboard Music Awards. The song was written by Prince. O’Connor made it hers.
She was Irish. She was a musician. She was also an activist who used her platform to confront child abuse, racism, and mental health stigma. She did not separate her music from her causes. She did not separate her public self from her private struggles. She spoke openly about her spiritual journey and her own experiences with mental illness. This candor was not a marketing strategy. It was a fact of her life.
The 1992 *Saturday Night Live* incident remains the moment most people reference. O’Connor tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II. The backlash was immediate and enormous. She was booed off stage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert weeks later. Her records were smashed in public protests. Radio stations stopped playing her music. She was mocked on television, in newspapers, by comedians, by other musicians. The Catholic Church sexual abuse cases had not yet become widely publicized. That changed years later. By then, O’Connor had already paid the price for saying what others would eventually say too.
What is at stake in remembering O’Connor correctly is not nostalgia. It is the question of who gets to speak truth to power and who gets destroyed for doing it. O’Connor was not a saint. She was a woman with a shaved head and a loud voice who refused to be polite. She was a woman who sold seven million records and then watched her career crater because she refused to stay silent about an institution she believed was covering up the abuse of children. She was right. The world caught up. But catching up does not undo what happened to her.
Her activism extended beyond the church. She spoke out about racism in the music industry. She advocated for women’s rights. She talked about mental health at a time when the conversation was far less common. She did all of this while making music that was commercially successful and artistically respected. She did not have to choose between being an artist and being an activist. She chose both.
The risk of sanitizing O’Connor is real. The risk of reducing her to a single headline, a single photograph, a single act of protest, is that we lose the full human being. She was difficult. She was uncompromising. She was sometimes wrong. She was also brave in a way that cost her everything. That is the story. That is the stakes.
Her death on July 26, 2023, brought an outpouring of tributes. Many of the same institutions and people who had ridiculed her in 1992 praised her in 2023. That is a kind of justice, but it is a thin one. O’Connor did not need vindication. She needed to be heard when she was speaking. She was speaking all along.
