On the night of the broadcast, O’Connor had arrived at the Rockefeller Centre in a confused frame of mind. I would compare Ireland to an abused child.” I spent my entire childhood being beaten up because of the social conditions under which my mother grew up. “The cause of my own abuse was the Church’s effect on this country. Not a healthy woman at all,” O’Connor said in Nothing Compares. She had a traumatic relationship with her mother, who “stripped and kicked” her as a child. A mania descended upon the country.īut, as pointed out already, Church misogyny wasn’t O’Connor’s only target. The pope’s trip was Ireland’s equivalent of Britain following the death of Diana. O’Connor, who was 13 at the time, will have remembered the mass outpouring of emotion all too well. Catholic Ireland had reached its apotheosis in 1979, when Pope John Paul II became the first pope in history to visit Ireland. Born in 1966, she had grown up in an Ireland where, if the Church’s days were numbered, women remained marginalised. Women with something to say are always deemed a dangerous thing.”Īs alluded to above, O’Connor’s motivations for ripping up the picture were complex and personal. All we have to do is look at all the male artists who have had a slap on the wrist and then go on as normal. Every time she spoke out, which is what many artists do, she was at risk of being cancelled. “O’Connor became an oft-parodied figure in popular culture. She was deemed mad and unpredictable, causing the end of her career,” says Linda Coogan Byrne, a music publicist who has researched gender disparity in radio playlists in Ireland and the UK. “The fact that she was right to rip up the picture of the Pope and expose the harsh realities of what was going on behind closed doors was irrelevant. Within a few years, they would burst, the country swamped in clerical abuse scandals. Public opinion in Ireland was slowly yet inexorably turning against the Catholic Church. The scandal came and went largely unnoticed.
And it wasn’t as if you could seek out the clip on YouTube.
Saturday Night Live had a negligible cultural imprint (to this day, its groaning, immature humour remains lost in cultural translation). One reason was that the footage of O’Connor was not widely seen. When you’ve outraged Madonna, you know you’ve touched a nerve.īack in Ireland, the response was more muted. “I think there is a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people,” she said. Even Madonna – the mother superior of scandalous pop stars – criticised O’Connor. Joe Pesci, a devout Catholic, said he would “have given her such a smack” when he hosted SNL the following week. “Holy Terror!” ran the front-page headline of the New York Daily News. Whatever her motives, America was scandalised. When you’ve outraged Madonna, you know you’ve touched a nerve
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