From a schoolgirl in 1992, who will always want what she hasn't got

I just coined a phrase in my mind. Sineád was the patron saint of the fucked up but unable to back down. I wasn't so much younger than her, but I didn't quite get it at the time, in sixth form, in 1992. I’m still thinking about it now.

I was a Catholic schoolgirl too. The thing they taught as critical thinking, our heritage, was a sharp scepticism of anything that challenged what men told me - or of what I was told by the women, who sometimes made a point of holding men's views more belligerently than the men themselves.

That's what we called empowerment for women and girls. Meanwhile, I felt furtive when I bled each month; and hoped, desperately, I wasn't gay.

Catholicism - and this is hard to explain - when fully realised turns upon itself. It goes kind of gonzo. People become radical, without self-censorship; wholly self-defeating, able to serve only their own conscience. Others think they’re nuts. Trauma can make people go the same way. Catholicism and trauma form a Venn diagram. Sineád occupied the ellipse in the middle - and never quietly or obediently.

I think it was 1992, or maybe the next year, I was sent to stay with a priest for a week: a friend of a friend. He later pled guilty to indecent assault. I was probably safe: his victims were two boys, brothers. I heard people say, he probably just pled guilty because his loyalty, his purity, meant he didn’t want to cause trouble for the Church - and anyway, the boys’ mother was a solo mum, probably had a motive. You can’t trust slags.

Sineád still loved the Church. She only wanted to kick down its door, scream into the arches of its ceiling. I get that too.

Her voice reached heaven. And I don’t agree with all she said, not even close; but damn, I’d glad that she spoke.

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