The close-up with the tears in Nothing Compares 2 U, the photo of the Pope broken before the cameras, the public boos, the uncomfortable statements, the suicide attempts, the personal demons that torment her, the pain that has no cure.

For more than thirty years, Sinead O'Connor tried to survive in the public eye. A huge talent for singing, scandals, personal problems and tragedies crossed her. Last week her name returned to the newspapers after the suicide of her 17-year-old son Shane . Another misfortune, another devastating blow. A few days later she was hospitalized because her relatives feared that she would try, once again, to take her own life.

Nothing Compares 2 U's stripped back, stripped back video made a splash. The climax came when in the extreme close-up of Sinead's beautiful face two tears fell from her eyes. It is no coincidence that it was in the part where the lyrics refer to the mother and to all the flowers that she planted and are already dead (All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard, they all died and withered away)

Sinead's mother died in a car accident when she was a teenager (on the day of her death, a photo that the woman had of Pope John Paul II was taken off the wall of her mother's room; she kept it for a few years until she used it the day from his appearance on SNL). But before her, when she was a child and after the separation from the singer's father, he physically abused her. The torments in Sinead's life began at a very young age.

As a teenager, she ran away from her house: “ It was not a home. It was a torture chamber. she said she. She tried to live with her father for a while, but that coexistence also failed. She skipped school and became a kleptomaniac (habit inherited from her mother). They arrested her and took her to an institute for minors. “I have never experienced such terror and pain as in that place.”

At age 15, a man in the recording industry heard her singing Barbra Streissand 's Evergreen at a party and hired her. While she was working in her studio on her first album, which would become The Lion and The Cobra, the man asked her to let her hair grow longer and for her to dress in tighter clothes, to be “more feminine”, she emphasized. Sinead's response was to go to her nearest hair salon and shave her head, adopting the look with which she would become famous. But that was not the only inconvenience and disagreement during the recording. Sinead became pregnant and the managers wanted her to have an abortion, but she refused. When all the songs were mixed, Sinead opposed her publication because she, she said, the Celtic arrangements matched all the tracks and detracted from her work. The songs were re-recorded. The album received excellent reviews and paved the way for the explosion that would come with the second.

In 1990 she reached the top with I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got and the Prince cover. “That was my second severe identity crisis: fame. The first had been my mother's abuse. All that attention on my person, the public judgment, the persecutions, ended up unbalancing me " Sinead wrote.

Although in the collective imagination the incident of the Pope's photo was crystallized as the breaking point, Sinead had been leading scandals and defying the common sense of her time.

After her great success with Nothing Compares 2 U, the attention of the public and the press focused on her. And those attitudes of rebellion and opposition that were frequent in her began to have another repercussion and other consequences. In the midst of that triumphant tour, while she was dominating the charts around the world, she didn't show up in New Jersey because she refused to play the US anthem before her performance of her. The episode landed her on the front page of every tabloid and became a top story on several TV newscasts.

They all had something to say. MC Hammer bought her a first class ticket for her to go back to Ireland. The most forceful response came from The Godfather of show business, the most influential man for decades, turned in 1990, into the patriarch, into a herbivorous lion. Frank Sinatra , when asked about the incident, said: "I'm going to kick his ass." That same year she rejected the nominations she received for the Grammy, considering that the music could not be evaluated for its commercial success.

One of the problems was that 1990's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, and its huge hit-smashing hit, made her a superstar, budding pop diva while she felt (in those days) times the term self-perceived was not used) as a punk protest singer.

The story with Saturday Night Live had started a couple of years earlier. Amidst the success of Nothing Compares 2 U, she was called up to be the musical guest. She accepted but a few days before she refused to participate. The host, the guest who hosts the show and performs in several of the sketches, that week was Andrew Dice Clay , a comedian who played on the edges and whom Sinead accused of being a misogynist and a bully. And, for that reason, she refused to share the screen with him.

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Two years later, Sinead released Am I Not Your Girl, a collection of standards ranging from Gershwin to No Llores Por Mi, Argentina. She again she was invited to SNL. She accepted. The host would be Tim Robbins who would establish some political positions and even wear a t-shirt against General Electric for its acts of environmental pollution (GE was the owner of NBC, the channel on which the program was broadcast). But Robbins remained an amateur, he went completely unnoticed.

Sinead's first entry on the show went as planned, she sang magnificently with her band backing her up. The second of hers, shortly before the end of the program, she modified it in the last rehearsal. She was going to sing a capella a medley of some of her best-known songs, but she asked to do a cover of Bob Marley , War. She announced that at the end of the interpretation she would show a photo of a malnourished boy from Africa to alert about hunger in the world. But in the live at the final moment, when she took the photo that was on a stool next to her, she showed an image of Pope John Paul II . As she sang the final verses, Confidence in the victory of good over evil, she tore the photo into several pieces just above the word Evil. Each rip caused a commotion.

The next day the scandal made the front page of the newspapers and Sinead became Public Enemy Number 1. Everyone had something to say about her (always bad). On SNL, Joe Pesci and Madonna attacked her on subsequent shows. NBC forever banned her presence on any channel show. No one spoke at that time of the abuse of minors in the church, which was the subject on which the singer wanted to draw attention. Then, several years later, Sinead was proven right, but no one cared about her anymore. She said that the idea came to her when she remembered that as a child she saw Bob Geldolf singing with the Boomtown Rats on English television and that in the middle of a song he destroyed a photo of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John , Disco music was the great enemy of rock

For many that moment was professional suicide, at that moment she not only tore up the photo of John Paul II: she also did it with her career. But she doesn't see it that way. She believes the opposite. In an interview she gave to the New York Times in mid-2021 she said that having a mega hit like Nothing Compares 2 U derailed her career, that she only got back on her normal and proper path after the incident on SNL.

“I am not sorry. It was brilliant. But, at the same time, very traumatic. They started treating me like a whore and a crazy person,” said Sinead.

Ten days after her time on SNL, Sinead performed at a major Bob Dylan tribute concert for his 30-year career that was held at Madison Square Garden. Kris Kristofferson announced her and as Sinead appeared her crowd started whistling and booing her . Some applauded but were covered by those who condemned with ardor. The booing grew and became a kind of mass slaughter. The episode in the photo had not gone unnoticed.

She stood in front of everyone and waited . When the intensity of the disapproval seemed to subside, one of her band members began to play the song. She stopped him. And she stepped a little further onstage. With her hands behind her back she continued to receive as much hate and contempt as possible. Kris Kristofferson, in an act of great courage, entered her, hugged her and spoke in her ear: "Don't let these bastards beat you." She nodded and continued to stand defiantly, showing that they were not going to beat her. She suddenly started singing War, again a cappella. Most of the howling died down. She yelled the last verses furiously and left.

It's almost five shocking minutes. There can't be too many moments of such tension in the history of music where an artist stands before a hostile audience with such courage.

After these episodes, her career did not pick up anymore although she continued to release albums from time to time (some of them very good).

She divorced the father of her child. It was not a peaceful separation. The man argued that she was not a trustworthy mother and the judge agreed with him. He set up a visitation schedule that allowed Sinead only one visit per month because he considered her dangerous to her daughter. After knowing the resolution, the singer tried to commit suicide with an overdose of barbiturates the day she turned 33.

Her personal problems spread. Divorces, addictions, depression and mental problems.

In her interviews she does not use euphemisms. She talks about madness and names her mental illnesses: bipolar disorder, addictions and post-traumatic stress. She asks for help.

But she also marks differences in the treatment of the subject. And she provides an example. In the early 1990s, journalists asked her about her relationship with Prince , the author of Nothing Compares 2 U. She replied that she preferred not to talk about it but that when she was old and wrote her memoir, she would tell everything. She is not old, she just turned 55, but last year she published Rememberings, an autobiographical book. There she reveals that Prince invited her to her mansion in Hollywood and that her evening was terrifying.

The host served a soup that Sinead didn't want to eat, but the musician insisted that she do so, threatening her with a knife; he called her out for saying bad words in her interviews; With an innocent face, he proposed to play a pillow fight so many times that she finally accepted, but in the first blow she discovered that he had put a blunt object inside the pillowcase. She ran out of the house barefoot. Prince followed her in her car asking her to come back for blocks and threatening her. She was rescued by a man who made her get into her car on the highway so that the harassment would end.

Beyond the interest (and the atrocity) of her anecdote, Sinead uses it to show that she never called Prince "crazy" , but to designate him as a musical genius (which he was). She didn't even associate it with violent behavior towards women or misogyny. On the other hand, her qualification persecuted her as a stigma, as a disqualification. And there were few who helped her along her path. Everyone wants to get something more, to gloat over the public and resounding fall, to exploit its fragility.

As she came out of one of her crises she became a devout Catholic and she became close to her children. She took the name of Mother Bernadette Mary. She tried to return to music but her releases did not have much repercussion. She retired from music again. She said that she didn't want to be known. She that she only wanted to have a normal life, something that she had not achieved until now.

But she went through a divorce again and her problems deepened. For a time she went to live alone in a small hotel on the outskirts of New York. She did it to get away from her family, not to hurt them. During that voluntary seclusion, she recorded a video that was later uploaded to the networks: “Why are we alone? Those of us who suffer from mental illness are the most vulnerable people on earth. They should take care of us. We are not like the others."

She intervened every time she saw a young singer being slaughtered by pressure and exposure. She felt represented, she saw her story reflected in them, and she wanted to prevent them from going through the same thing. “You are not going to receive anything in this path of the music industry; only damage. Don't let them exploit you,” she wrote in a public letter to Miley Cyrus . She asked him to defend her talent, not to allow her to be turned into a sexual object, not to be exploited. She also spoke out publicly whenever Britney or Amy Winehouse got into trouble.

She married two other times but they were short-lived marriages. The last time after the separation she tried to commit suicide again in a hotel in Las Vegas.

In 2016, after another legal battle for the custody of her children, and after a series of posts on her social networks that worried everyone, she was declared missing . Everyone feared that she had taken her own life. Chicago police found her a day later. In 2018 she converted to Islam. She changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat.

But she did not achieve the desired tranquility either. Her mental problems and her drug use worsened. She voluntarily admitted herself for a year to be treated.

During 2021 she was seen to be quite recovered during the interviews she gave for the release of her memoir. But she received another terrible blow.

Earlier this year, her 17-year-old son Shane disappeared from the institution where he was confined. Sinead cried out on social media for his return, asking him not to make any fatal decisions. But the young man was found dead a few hours later. He had hanged himself. Sinead sent him off with a heartfelt post and begged the young people to follow his example, to seek help. The next day, she was hospitalized and medicated.

At 55, Sinead O'Connor is going through another tragedy, another season in her ordeal. She received another terrible blow, perhaps the worst of all. Hopefully it will be the last and she can find peace.

Suicide Assistance Center. Hours: from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. (011) 5275-1135

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