Sinead O’Connor speaks out following interview with Ian Bailey
Sinead O’Connor has spoken out following her controversial interview with Ian Bailey.
The interview with Bailey, featured in last weekend’s Sunday Independent, has attracted plenty of comment and criticism, not least over Bailey’s state of inebriation throughout the interview. O’Connor, however, has hit back at criticism of how she conducted the interview.
“Claims Bailey has made that I plied him with drink are laughable and false. In our interview he slipped up and gave himself away. He knows he did. His lies are a weak attempt to create a smokescreen.
“He is of Lilliputian intelligence and desperately unrehearsed,” she said, referencing the race of tiny people from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
Some have questioned the propriety around interviewing Bailey while potentially inebriated, whereas others have questioned whether it is appropriate to interview him at all.
“If he’d any issues about being interviewed while drunk he wouldn’t ply himself with alcohol before and during interviews. Anyone suggesting I shouldn’t have interviewed him while drunk needs to tell that to anyone who ever interviewed Shane McGowan,” she said.
“FYI for anyone thinking of being interviewed. If you don’t want to be interviewed while drunk don’t arrange interviews and then make a conscious decision to get drunk before and during them. Especially if you like to think you’re as ‘media savvy’ as the turkey man [Bailey] does.”
O’Connor, who also goes by the names Magda Davitt and Shuhada Sadaqat, also posted a video in which she appears to mock Bailey by pretending to weep and saying: “What a terrible lady, what a terrible journalist, what terrible, terrible questions! She kept giving me drink, she lifted my hand and forced it down my throat. Poor me! Horrible, horrible women.”
Bailey denies any involvement in the death of Ms. Toscan du Plantier, and has never been charged with the crime by Gardaí. He has been tried and convicted in absentia of the murder in a French court, though the Irish High Court has refused to extradite him.
— Sinead O'Connor (Shuhada Sadaqat) (@MagdaDavitt77) July 19, 2021
On her Twitter account, O’Connor has also denied claims made by Bailey in The Star that the pair discussed “putting his poems to music” or that she was “flirty with him.”
