I watched Saturday Night Live on October 3, 1992. I saw Sinéad O’Connor—as she then was—tear the photo of the Pope and applauded her. I didn’t hear her though. Nor did anyone else. The abusive institutions from church to school to studio all relied on the sheer scale of their violations being incredible.
It came as a shock yesterday after her unexpected death to hear her. Finally. For in that 1992 rendition of “War” by Bob Marley, she changed the entire meaning of the song by adding the line
Child Abuse! Yeah! Child Abuse! Yeah!
Although I had watched it, I hadn’t heard that line before, in the sense of registering it. It comes in the fifth verse of the song, replacing lines in Haile Selassie’s original speech about the struggle in Angola and Mozambique. O’Connor spoke often at the emotional and physical abuse she suffered as a child. Her words logically led into Selassie/Marley’s line
Subhuman Bondage!
If I did not hear this, it was not for want of the singer’s effort. With all the astonishing intensity of her instrument, O’Connor hit each word and exclamation point. Her phrasing was utterly on point. Her breath surrounds the words as a counterpoint, signifying life and marking out the rhythm. This line was sung in a distinctively Irish accent—especially the phrasing of ab-use. This was about Ireland.
And very certainly about England.
From the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares, I learned that O’Connor had read a news article about court cases against the Church for abuse being blocked. I saw no such story in the US media. Yesterday, the news would not even show her tearing the photograph, let along singing about child abuse. The video is not shared by SNL. It was, and is, war.
In the next verse, O’Connor transformed lines about fighting in Africa into her battle cry:
Children! Children! Fight!
The voice goes from the pitch of declaiming to a shout in a beat. The shout is in time, which is to say, not before time. It makes two words of Chil-Dren and in the gap between them you feel how the children were broken, died, and have come back to fight as something other than children.
In 2007, I read John Banville’s novel Christine Falls about the abuse in the appalling Magdelene Laundries. And again, I found the scale of the violence depicted to be excessive. Only to find later that he had underplayed it. As a child, O’Connor was sent to a Magdelene laundry for shoplifting.
And all along, I was dissociating from my own violation at the hands of my elite educational institution in London, St. Paul’s School. Who could believe that the school of Milton and Montgomery was was an organized ring of child abusers? And it continues to do business today, with the tuition around £30,000 a year being the price of admission to an elite university.
No one could believe that a young woman punk singer from Ireland had seen through all of that in 1992. Bob Dylan fans booed her. The official outrage was about the Pope. At that time, John-Paul II was a Cold War hero, a symbol of the triumph of capitalism over Soviet “communism” and an emblem of the ongoing crusade against Saddam Hussein.
Even if O’Connor’s call was not heard in 1992, it registered at some level. Camille Paglia said on TV that she deserved child abuse. Joe Pesci said he would give her—a battered child—a “slap.” Madonna did sly work to reclaim her place as the Catholic bad girl.
In an open letter to the Irish Times in 1993, O’Connor wondered what would happen “if you could really listen” to me. I didn’t then and I’m so sorry—for her, for me and for all of us.
But everywhere is still war.
The US news showed the SNL video yesterday. They didn’t play the line “child abuse” and they stopped before the photo was torn. Ireland may be in a better place today. The US is doing all it can to become a theocracy under the guidance of the Supreme Court.
Yesterday in London, several abuse victims were not believed because Elton John testified for Kevin Spacey. The war against bodily autonomy is everywhere. In the gym, I saw House Republicans holding a hearing to bring to federal level the denial of gender-affirmative care. In England, the Labour Party has backed away from self-elected gender in advance of what they believe will be a return to office.
Everywhere is war.
Are we “confident/ in the victory/ of good over evil”? It takes listening. And when you’ve listened, believe them, and act if you can. That would be the only fitting memorial to the person we never knew, Sinéad O’Connor, who changed her name several times and died as Shuhada' Sadaqat.
Thank you for this insightful essay, Nick. I must beg to differ in one regard: many of us who had been abused by the Catholic Church heard her--excruciatingly and gratefully. She has been a beacon of truth and powerful rebellion for me for my entire adult life. I am heartbroken at her passing and eternally grateful to her.