“Because of the media’s take on me, I had to endure a hellish experience. And potentially my daughter would have had to endure a hellish experience All sorts of people were saying I shouldn’t raise a girl. “I was accused of being an unfit mother,” she says, and now there is tension in her voice. She has decided to talk about this on record for the first time The cigarette is burning down fast. The backlash against her was huge, with leading Roman Catholics attacking the singer and urging the faithful not to buy her records Sales in the US fell dramatically. But the scandals she was raging against became public, in time.

Ireland went through convulsions as it evolved from a theocracy to a modern nation To some people O’Connor had been a prophet of that change To others she was doing the work of the devil. She was certainly demonised in some parts of the Irish and American press, and portrayed as out of control. That really mattered when she came close to losing custody of her daughter in the same year. Irish and American newspapers in particular dropped all pretence at subtlety and just started calling her “mad”, “deranged” and ” weird”. And she was dismissed as a fruitcake in 1999, when she was ordained as Mother Bernadette Marie by Bishop Michael Cox of the rebel Tridentine Order, at Lourdes. Both acts were meant as protests at the culture of silence that masked child-abuse scandals within the Church. “The big problem if you are a child abused is that you don’t really have a strong sense of your own identity.

Then suddenly you’re this famous person and everybody is on your back. For a good 17 or 18 years everyone was on my fucking back, as I see it. I had a very abusive experience.” What do you mean on your back? “Making me out to be this fucking controversial person – Sin? O’Controversy – just for being myself.” Her voice is calmer than those words look in print She is just giving me the facts as she sees them. “The media whipped * up this whole thing of Sin? O’Connor the crazy woman, you know? You’re looking at your name on a piece of paper and that’s not you You lose your entire personality. That affected my life in ways people would not have begun to dream of.” She was being herself when she appeared on Saturday Night Live in America in 1992 and tore up a picture of the Pope.

And again at Madison Square Garden only a fortnight later when she came on stage at a tribute concert for Bob Dylan, wrapped a rastafarian prayer cloth around the microphone and sang an unaccompanied version of “War”, a musical rendition of a speech Haile Selassie made to the United Nations in 1963: “Until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race, ‘dis a war.” The song was originally performed by Bob Marley (everyone else had sung Dylan) and O’Connor changed the lyrics to mention child abuse Some of the audience cheered her audacity but many booed. “I never took time to recover from what had gone on when I was growing up, and to establish a sense of self,” she says, quietly but surely. Then I got carried along on this whole rollercoaster of becoming “Sin? O’Connor”, in inverted commas.” She signals them with her fingers. Right from the beginning of her career, O’Connor talked about the physical and mental abuse she had suffered at the hands of her mother (although the extent of it was disputed by other members of her family). She bared her metaphorical wounds in her music and in interviews, choosing to be heard as a voice for others who had been abused.