Track Thirteen

Three things here are contested and the book does not settle them: whether An Grianán belongs on the state's schedule of Magdalen institutions, the diagnosis Sinéad O'Connor disclosed in 2007 and later disputed herself, and what ended her American career. The versions are set out and left standing. Her mother's house is described in testimony there is nobody left to check it against.

What is not contested sits on a disc. Am I Not Your Girl? has twelve songs printed on the sleeve and thirteen on the record. The thirteenth is not sung. It is spoken, it runs two minutes, and its subject is the abuse of children. Because it was not on the listing, nobody played it, nobody reviewed it, and nobody asked her about it. Nineteen days later she stood in Studio 8H, sang "War" unaccompanied with one word altered, held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II she had taken off her dead mother's bedroom wall, and tore it into four pieces. It took about eight seconds. NBC counted 4,484 complaints against 725 calls of support.

She was not making a gesture. She was giving evidence, and she gave it loudly only because she had already given it quietly and nothing came back. At fifteen she had spent eighteen months inside the Grianán Training Centre at Drumcondra, on the grounds of High Park, where the order also ran a Magdalen laundry. In 1993 that congregation applied to exhume one hundred and thirty-three graves there. One hundred and fifty-five bodies came out of the ground. Over the next twenty years the state published, on its own paper, substantially what she had said in eight seconds. She was alive for all of it, and it did not vindicate her, because being agreed with and being believed are different events.

This is not a canonization, and it says so at the front. The same instrument produced an accusation retracted under a defamation suit, and records that were not good. Track thirteen is still where she left it, unlisted, two minutes long, spoken rather than sung.