“She was the guiding light and she was a torch that brought us out of the dark ages, particularly in Ireland,” the Irish film-maker Kathryn Ferguson tells Nosheen Iqbal. “And for that we owe her everything.”
Ferguson directed Nothing Compares, a 2022 documentary about the singer Sinéad O’Connor’s life. She explains why O’Connor spoke out about abuse in the Catholic church in the early 1990s when it was still taboo to do so and how the singer’s activism helped to shape modern Ireland.
“She has directly influenced the young people that have changed the country, 100%” she says.
The journalist Simon Hattenstone interviewed Sinéad a couple of times for the Guardian, and kept in touch with her over the last few years of her life. He recalls what it was like to speak to her and what she told him about her relationship with faith.
“She kind of broke your heart like no one else did,” Hattenstone says. “I think part of the reason she broke your heart was because she was so funny with it.”
The interviews in this episode were recorded before O’Connor’s funeral.
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