Sinead’s son, 17, dies … new tragedy for star I found ‘lost in her own world’
Sinead O’Connor’s teenage son has been found dead two days after he was reported missing.
His mother took to social media saying singer ‘Shane decided to end his earthly struggle’. Only days earlier Sinead had threatened the hospital where Shane was being looked after with legal action for ‘letting him out of their grasp while he was on suicide watch’.
But her later tweet was devastating: ‘My beautiful son, Nevi’im Nesta Ali Shane O’Connor, the very light of my life, decided to end his earthly struggle today and is now with God.
‘May he rest in peace and may no one follow his example. My baby. I love you so much. Please be at peace:’
Shane, who went missing on Thursday, was one of Sinead’s four children – Jake Reynolds, Roisin Waters and Yeshua Francis Neil Bonadio.
Sinead, who changed her name to Shuhada’ Davitt in 2018, also tweeted a Bob Marley song which she dedicated to Shane,
Shane went missing and was last seen in Tallaght, South Dublin, on Friday, with Gardai launching an appeal to find the teenager. The police reportedly confirmed on Saturday that the search for Shane had been ‘stood down’.
I met Sinead briefly in the 1990s in a pub in Birmingham. A friend of mine was writing about her … she was still a star with the ability to shine over her own narrowing horizons. Sinead was enigmatic, mysterious, vulnerable and gentle. Nothing like the firebrand of skewed politics and skinless tub thumping she was becoming known for.
She sipped her drink but smoked heavily. Her fingers were brown. She had a fashionable gypsy quality back then and I liked her.
Sinead is intelligent and political… but it was her politics and peripheral way of being that ultimately damaged her artistic career.
She ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II live on US television.
In 1999, she was ordained by a breakaway church in Lourdes.
In 2010, she called for Catholics to boycott Mass until there was a full investigation into the Vatican’s role in the issue of child abuse.
In December 2011, she annulled her fourth marriage to therapist Barry Herridge 16 days after their wedding.
About four years ago Sinead went on Facebook saying that she was all alone and struggling to survive.
“I am now living in a motel in New Jersey. I’m all by myself,” she said. “Mental illness, it’s like drugs, it doesn’t care who you are, and equally what’s worse, the stigma doesn’t care who you are.”
She said then hat her family has abandoned her, criticized them for not taking care of her for the past two years and said she only has one person she can trust. “There’s absolutely nobody in my life except my doctor, my psychiatrist – the sweetest man on earth, who says I’m his hero – and that’s about the only thing keeping me alive at the moment… and that’s kind of pathetic.
“My entire life is revolving around not dying, and that’s not living,” she added. “And I’m not going to die, but still, this is no way for people to be living.”
Here at The Society our hearts go out to Sinead and her family. And I will never forget this star I found ‘lost in her own world’…
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