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Last month, the Cranberries became the first Irish band to join the YouTube hall of fame, with over a billion views for their anti-war smash hit 'Zombie'. Here, Barry Eganremembers Dolores O'Riordan; a woman who was unhappy, talented and loving in equal measure
Listening, my shoulders dropped. I was sitting in the tiny St Ailbe's Church in Ballybricken in Co Limerick on January 23, 2018, for Dolores O'Riordan's memorial service, which ended with a recording of Dolores singing When You're Gone by The Cranberries.
Rendered hymn-like, it was ethereal, and beautiful, not least because Dolores, who grew up down the road from the church, was finally released from the pain of this world into the other world that she believed in.
Even now, sometimes it is hard to finally believe that she is, as the song says, gone. She was a great woman and a great friend, and I loved her then as I love her now.
Ireland is a lesser place without her creativity, without her empathy, without her. There are very few like her.
There are wounds that never show on the body; deeper and more painful than anything you can see. Dolores's wounds weren't visible. Unless you looked at her some days and saw how sad she was, with her secret sorrows. Her singing, her gift to a privileged world, was a response to inner pain, and had its origins in trauma and isolation.
In the summer of 2013, Dolores asked me to come to her house in Abington, Malahide, Co Dublin. Up in her bedroom, after a long silence, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head hung low, she said the words: "I was raped, abused, as a child. I was only a child. For years. I was only a little girl. For four years, when I was a little girl, I was sexually abused."
Those words still haunt. As they should. It seemed somehow prescient that Dolores's mother Eileen named her daughter in honour of Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, or Sorrows. Eileen once told me the story of a music business executive coming to the O'Riordan family home in 1995 to see her daughter, by then a rock star. "She was very sick. He...