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Finally, I broach the subject of her brief marriage. “Look.” She shrugs. “I know this might seem dreadfully cold-hearted, but I actually do see the funny side of it all. There’s no point crying. I’ve had enough practice. I know what happens when you break up. You feel shit for an hour or two, then you’re all right, then you’re shit for another hour or two, and then one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll be grand. The best way to get over one man is to get under another!” She was a Celtic female warrior. She had a great, mischievous sense of humour and unlike many big stars didn’t take herself too seriously. She had a temper, too. And she was very brave. Not afraid to be outspoken, if she felt the need. A good heart, she had. An Irish heart. ‘She defied a TV network, a country, a religion’

Sinéad O’Connor photographed for the Observer New Review in 2014. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer ‘The power of her voice broke the mic’ Since then, it’s become the norm to portray her as eccentric, self-destructive, even mad, but even if her message hasn’t always been articulated clearly, it has stayed consistent, and time has proved her right on many things. Report after report is now making clear the extent of both the abuse of children in Ireland and the Catholic Church’s attempts to cover it up. When I ask if she feels vindicated by this, she quietly says that isn’t important. “What matters is that the people this happened to have been vindicated.” In a 2010 conversation published during my editorship of the Tablet, the Catholic weekly, she spoke of the love of the Catholic faith of her childhood: “The people who are now running the business of Catholicism don’t actually seem to appreciate true Catholicism. The love and curiosity I have about religion, and the passionate love I have for the Holy Spirit, come from Catholicism. I’m interested in the idea of the saints, everything about it. I mean, it’s beautiful.” But her new album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, is her most straightforwardly commercial for years. Released this February, it was recorded in London with her ex-husband and long-time collaborator, producer John Reynolds, who is Jake’s father as well as one of her best friends. “He knows me artistically better than anyone, so he knows how to get the best out of me. And he always has a very casual set-up in his house, so you don’t really feel like the red light is on. I was recording in my nightdress and slippers!” There’s a well-chosen cover version on the album, a glorious interpretation of John Grant’s furious break-up song ‘Queen of Denmark’. There are narrative songs about characters such as a junkie and a single mum, and a handful of what she describes as “romantic, girly love songs.” These include ‘Old Lady’, a song about waiting till she’s older to consummate her crush on the film director Neil Jordan – who also happens to be best friends with Yeshua’s dad, American entrepreneur and bioengineer Frank Bonadio.

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Dublin Aids Alliance, now the charity HIV Ireland, was then a collective of community and voluntary organisations working with, and advocating for, people living with HIV and Aids. Sinéad’s decision to wear the T-shirt, which she probably considered a small gesture of solidarity, had a far-reaching impact on the community of people living with HIV in Ireland. Like so many of her fellow Catholics, especially women, Sinéad found the church oppressive at times and life-affirming. She recalled the nun who gave her her first guitar, and a priest who listened to her confession, and told her it was blasphemy to tell him how awful she was when God had made her the way she was. As her global smash hit Nothing Compares 2 U reached No 1 on the UK charts in February 1990, Sinéad appeared on what was, and remains, Ireland’s biggest television talkshow, RTÉ’s The Late Late Show. Wearing a Dublin Aids Alliance T-shirt, she used her platform to highlight the stigma facing people living with HIV.

Devastatingly beautiful and terrifyingly provocative’ ... O’Connor in the Netherlands. Photograph: Michel Linssen/Redferns For her, she once said, the Holy Spirit was a bird, free to fly and land where it chose. I hope that Sinéad’s spirit now has that freedom. ‘She coped with sadness and rage through song’ HIV Ireland’s community support manager, Dr Erin Nugent, says: “Many people living with HIV recall, years later, the profound impact of seeing Sinéad in the T-shirt and listening to her advocating for people living with HIV and Aids who felt judged, marginalised and frightened.” A still from Nothing Compares, the 2022 documentary directed by Kathryn Ferguson. Photograph: Alamy

I first met Sinéad when she was still in school in the early 80s. She came along to Eamonn Andrews’ recording studio in Dublin to make a demo of her song Take My Hand with our band In Tua Na – she loved being part of it all. She walked in carrying her canvas school bag. I remember her hero Kate Bush’s name carefully etched in marker on it. She’s enjoying sharing this girly phase with her daughter – it’s something she says she missed in her own troubled childhood. By the time she was Róisín’s age, she was living with her father, who was one of the first men in Ireland to win full custody of his children. Her mother died in a car accident two years later, when Sinéad was just 17. “When I was growing up, she wasn’t well, so it was hard for her to make me feel good about being a girl. But now I find my daughter is doing that, which is fantastic and completely accidental.”