Musicians are among those paying tribute to Sinéad O’Connor ahead of her funeral.
Liam O Maonlai, a musician with Irish band The Hothouse Flowers, said the Irish star was “up against it from the get-go”.
Speaking ahead of her funeral procession in Bray, Co Wicklow, he said he hoped she smiled in her last moments.
He told the PA news agency: “The career-minded (musicians) who stay within a parameter of what they’re told to do. They find a formula and they stick to it. She didn’t do that.”
He said he last spoke to O’Connor at a birthday party either last year or the year before.
Fans have been gathering outside her former home on the Bray seafront before paying their final respects when her funeral cortege passes.
Asked why so many people had gathered at her home, O Maonlai said “everyone has their own reasons”.
“I think it’s love is why people are outside the house today. They loved her. I admired her.”
Ken Doyle of the band Bagatelle, was a neighbour of O’Connor’s when she lived on the Bray seafront.
Sinéad O’Connor’s funeral cortége will pass through Bray today. Ken Doyle of the band Bagatelle was her neighbour on the seafront. He remembers a shy person who considered Bob Marley her hero. pic.twitter.com/hAzbYaN14m
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) August 8, 2023
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He told RTÉ: “Sinead was a very private person and me being in the music business in Bagatelle as well, I know when people need their space.
“She had the quoin stones painted with the Rastafarian flag and I met her at the gate and I just said, ‘Hi Sinead, you must be a big Bob Marley fan with the Rastafarian flag on the quoin stones.’
“And she said, ‘I am. I’m a huge fan. He’s my hero really.’
“And I said, ‘Well, I had the honour of supporting him at Dalymount Park in 1980.’
“And she looked at me and took a puff from her cigarette, and said, ‘You lucky fecker’. And she walked away and that was our conversation.”
Bray resident Adrian Duggan said it was “phenomenal” to see so many people gathered outside Sinead O’Connor’s home, adding the singer was a “once off”.
He said: “We used to see her a lot but she kept to herself, very private.
“Most people keep to themselves (in Bray).”
He said he found the pink chair placed on the steps to the late singer’s former home on the beach.
“I’d never seen a pink chair on the beach before,” he said, so he placed it in front of the house’s pink-framed conservatory at the head of planters full of pink and purple flowers.
He said his friend is a neighbour of O’Connor and told him she had a chair “exactly like it”.
Ruth O’Shea came with her daughters, Emily and Daisy, to pay their respects to O’Connor.
Ms O’Shea said the singer “meant the world to her” when she was growing up.
“She was so rebellious and empowering and inspiring, and my mother hated me listening to her music.
“And yeah, she was just brilliant. Brilliant – I loved her, and then the kids, I suppose by osmosis because I played her, when they were both growing up, they’d go, ‘oh God, mom’s listening to Sinead O’Connor, she’s obviously had a rough day.’
“She just gave me hope. And I just loved her, I loved her.”
Emily said her and her sister were attending to help their mother say goodbye to an artist she loved.
As she became tearful, Ms O’Shea said O’Connor was “magnificent”.
“It was OK to stand for what she believed in and she proved that to me,” she said.
“At the time when her songs were coming out and when she was imploding her career, she was doing this because she believed in what she stood for.”
