Profile: Sinead O’Connor

EVEN the most generous bookmaker would give a union which starts on Twitter and culminates in the Little White Wedding Chapel on Las Vegas Boulevard poor odds.

When it is between a drugs counsellor and a self-confessed “weed head” who has four children by different fathers, and is marrying for the fourth time, all bets might just be off.

In fact, Sinéad O’Connor’s marriage to Barry Herridge lasted only 16 days before dissolving on Christmas Eve amid lurid headlines and, according to O’Connor, the opprobrium of her short-lived in-laws.

“From the moment myself and my husband got together not long ago, there was intense pressure placed upon him by certain people in his life, not to be involved with me,” she wrote on her website on Boxing Day. “These were people who had never met me but had formed opinions of me based on what they read about ‘Sinéad O’Connor’ in the media.”

An ill-advised trawl around the Las Vegas hinterlands in search of drugs – she describes it as “a wild ride i [sic] took us on looking for a bit of a smoke of weed for me wedding night as I don’t drink” also left Herridge traumatised. She told one tabloid: “We ended up in a cab in some place that was quite dangerous. I wasn’t scared — but he’s a drugs counsellor. What was I thinking? Then I was handed a load of crack. Barry was very frightened — that kind of messed everything up a bit really.”

O’Connor is refusing to blame Herridge and is putting a positive a spin on this emotional car crash. “It became apparent to me that if he were to stay with me he would be losing too much to bear,” she writes on her website. “A woman wants to be a joy to her husband. So. U love someone? Set them free ... He is a wonderful man. I love him very much. I’m sorry I’m not a more regular woman.”

The 45-year-old singer has never been one to make her life easy, or to keep quiet when it all goes wrong. Despite having a three-decade career, selling millions of records and winning numerous awards, she is most famous for ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 as a protest against the Catholic Church’s stance on child abuse.

Recalling the career-defining incident she has said: “As a survivor of child abuse myself, I could see the horror of what was being done. I love Catholicism and I love the idea of God and I think it was a very unchristian way to be acting.”

A turbulent relationship with religion is just one of the recurring themes in Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor’s troubled life. Born in a quiet south Dublin suburb, Glenageary, her parents separated when Sinéad was eight. Despite the judge’s description of her mother’s behaviour as “extremely barbaric”, she and her two older siblings went to live with her. It was a chaotic and physically abusive childhood. O’Connor recalls her mother driving her and her sister Eimear around Dublin bars, posing as charity collectors. “Myself and my sister would go into pubs and collect hundreds of pounds and bring them home and my mother would take the money.”

By the age of 15, O’Connor, a shoplifter and persistent truant, was sent to one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene asylums, the Grianán Training Centre run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. It was here that one of the nuns recognised her musical talent and bought her a guitar. By the time her father, a barrister, whisked her off to a more progressive boarding school in Waterford, she had recorded her first four-song demo.

She quit school and moved to Dublin with her first band, Ton Ton Macoute. Her mother died in a car crash in 1985 and the 19-year-old O’Connor moved to London. She was signed by Ensign Records who gave her a copy of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and told her to do something similar. The resulting album, The Lion And The Cobra, combined with the striking juxtaposition of O’Connor’s angelic face and shaved head, caused a minor sensation.

It took a cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, from her second album, to transform O’Connor from NME talking point into an international star. Helped by a memorable video of tears running down the singer’s cheeks as she gives a neck-tingling performance, it was No 1 in Ireland for 11 weeks and topped the charts in the UK, Germany, Australia and the US. It was also nominated for several Grammy awards, including record of the year and best female pop vocal.

By the time of her breakthrough hit, O’Connor was already a mother. She married her drummer and producer, John Reynolds, in 1989; their son Jake is now 24 and they still work together. A relationship with Hot Press journalist John Waters produced a daughter, Brigidine Róisín, in 1996. Her second marriage, to Daily Mirror journalist Nick Sommerlad, lasted only 11 months and, after their divorce, O’Connor vowed never to wed again. In 2004, she had a son, Shane, with folk musician Donal Lunny. Frank Bonadio, ex-husband of another Irish singer, Mary Coghlan, is the father of her fourth child, Yeshua. They split up in 2007.

O’Connor, notorious for changing her mind, wed old friend and fellow musician Steve Cooney in 2010. They parted after less than a year, prompting a lonely O’Connor to take to the net, and Irish TV’s The Late Late Show, to bemoan her single status. Thousands of men responded; Herridge was the chosen one.

Diagnosed as bipolar in her teens, O’Connor has had a lifetime of therapy, and attempted suicide on her 33rd birthday. This is clearly a troubled soul. She was ordained a priest in a fringe Catholic sect in the 1990s. She claimed to be a lesbian in 2000, although has since claimed to be “three-quarters heterosexual, one quarter gay”. Having “retired” from the music industry in 2003, suffering from fibromyalgia, she then went on to make a reggae album and a collection of songs based on the Old Testament.

Meanwhile, she is seeking light relief from the Herridge aftermath on her beloved Twitter. “If u silly like me .. Follow an let’s have a laugh. No negativity. Just silliness. Thems the rules the Lady keeps these days.”

If only it were that simple.