On December 8, 1966, O’Connor was born in Glenageary, County Dublin. She was named Sinéad after Irish President Éamon de Valera’s wife, Marie after the mother of the doctor who presided over the delivery, and Bernadette after Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. She is the third of five siblings, including novelist Joseph, Eimear, John, and Eoin.
Sean O’Connor, a structural engineer who later became a barrister and chairperson of the Divorce Action Group, and Johanna Marie O’Grady, who married in 1960, are her parents. O’Connor left her mother in 1979 and moved in with her father and his new wife, Viola Suiter (née Cook). Her theft and truancy at the age of 15 resulted in her placement for eighteen months in a Magdalene asylum, the Grianán Training Centre managed by the Order of Our Lady of Charity.
She thrived there in some ways, particularly in the development of her writing and music, but she also chafed under the imposed conformity. Unruly students were occasionally sent to sleep in the adjacent nursing home, an experience she later described as “I have never—and probably will never—experienced such panic, terror, and agony over anything.”
