A link to the official video is here.

Just wanted to say a few words about Sinéad O'Connor today. I was never a huge fan but the news upset me a lot. I did love Nothing Compares 2 U though and still find the video mesmerising. Growing up I found the anger and sadness that seemed to seep out of her unsettling. Now, as an adult woman, I totally get it.

It was strange today to see the press and social media singing her praises when for over 30 years they've done nothing but hound and belittle her, make her out to be crazy and throw metaphorical eggs. Ironic.

RIP

The following was taken from an article by Suzanne Moore:

"There she is, a small girl who was made to sleep in the garden by her violent, abusive mother, being thrown out of various schools. This abuse is something O’Connor has never stopped speaking about. From early on, she recognised that the social conditions that had shaped her mother were inescapable, having been handed down through generations.
"Irish women were enslaved by the church. Women who became pregnant outside marriage – even after rape – were sent to the now notorious Magdalene Laundries, where many would remain all their lives. At one school, as a punishment for a minor misdemeanour, young Sinéad was sent to spend the night in a hospital ward full of wailing old ladies from the laundries. No one attends to their distress: they are abandoned even at the ends of the lives.
"Is it any wonder that O’Connor intuits so early that she must become a voice for the voiceless? It is her voice that saves her. A teacher recognises her talent, and soon she is in a band and whisked off to London. Ireland in the 80s was not ready for her. But were any of us?
...
"The following year, she boycotted the Grammys despite being up for four awards, believing the ceremony to be steeped in commercialism. She continued to speak about sexual assaults, child abuse, women’s right to abortion, racial discrimination. There was no toning her down. In the film, everyone from Peaches to John Grant pays tribute to her. There she is speaking at rallies to legalise abortion in Ireland two decades ago.
"In 1992, she effectively nuked her career by performing an acappella version of Bob Marley’s War on Saturday Night Live, changing some of the lyrics to refer to child abuse, and then tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II, saying, “Fight the Real Enemy”. She had taken the picture from her mother’s bedroom wall when she died.
"The response was immediate and massive. She was pelted with eggs as she left the studio, and that was just the beginning. The Washington Times called her “the pure face of hatred”.  Joe Pesci said he wanted to give her a smack, Madonna took the piss out of her, Camille Paglia said she had deserved to be abused as a child. She was blacklisted everywhere, including by NBC. That hurt less, she said, “than the rapes that hurt those Irish children”. She was not sorry and would not back down.
"Two weeks after this, her idol Bob Dylan had asked her to perform at the 30th anniversary of his first album. This footage is so hard to watch still, and it is in the film. Sinéad comes on stage in a ‘respectable’ blue jacket to perform I Believe in You. Kris Kristofferson introduces her as a young woman of courage and integrity. The crowd start booing and they don’t stop. Everything is there on her face: shock, fear, and then, somehow, pride and defiance. She cuts the music and sings Marley’s “War.” Just this tiny woman emitting a wail of insubordination. It is unbearable viewing. She runs off stage, apparently to vomit. Dylan said nothing. Not publicly anyway. [Kristofferson on the other hand was openly supportive, on stage.]
"I wrote a column in The Guardian at the time, defending her, but not many others spoke out on her behalf. The consensus was that she had just gone too far and was mad. She was effectively cancelled before we used such words.
"But she has no regrets, she  has always said, about tearing up the Pope picture. No apologies. “It was brilliant.” And traumatising. “Child abuse is an identity crisis and fame is an identity crisis, so I went straight from one identity crisis to another,” she observed in an interview to promote her 2021 memoir Rememberings.
"In 2001, the incumbent Pope finally addressed the way the Church had covered up decades of abuse. There is a bar in Dublin that has a mural of O’Connor that says something like, “You were right , we were wrong, we are sorry.”
...
"The Ireland of O’Connor’s childhood has changed almost beyond recognition – thanks in no small part to women like her.
... Ferguson, who had been nervous about showing the film in Ireland, sat in on a screening in Galway. When Sinéad tears up the picture of the Pope, the 500-strong audience got to its feet and cheered.
"Truly a different country has been born and Sinéad must be given full credit for helping birth it. Over the years, she has been treated brutally – as a child, by the record industry and by the press."

Thank you to the Blip team for reinstating my post.