He was too mad for Sinead. Sinead couldnt handle him.
John Waters is a journalist from Roscommon. He wrote for Hotpress during its heyday and did a famous interview with Charlie Haughey where Haughey swore through the whole thing and Waters just repeated it. He was very intelligent and insightful and a good writer. He wrote a few good books on Irish society and the Irish Times hired him.
He also knocked up and married Sinead O’Connor. Sinead said she was initially attracted to his intelligence, because he fairly goes on a bit.
He was a columnist there for years and held his own beside Kevin Myers and Fintan O’Toole during the Celtic Tiger period. He continually focused on fathers’ rights in the courts and wanted to end the in camera rule for family law cases. He attacked feminism generally and feminists despised him. He was always far more anti-establishment than your standard Irish Times columnist. The high point of his career was probably a long-running back and forth debate with Fintan O’Toole about abortion. O’Toole was right in that women should have the right to choose but I thought Waters won the debate in that the quality of his writing was better, which makes you question what the point of a debate is in the first place. Waters was a big celebrity and regularly featured on RTE. He wrote Ireland’s Eurovision song one year for a band called Dervish, which flopped completely.
Afterwards he had a fight with IT editor Geraldine Kennedy, left the Irish Times and went slightly mad, as evidenced by the Eamon Dunphy interview. It became apparent that a lot if his world view was based on resentment, in part because he never went to college. The message seemed to be that anyone not from an old rural upbringing shouldn’t be listened to. He’d start off an interview talking about his father used to attack urban dwellers by saying they didn’t even have a hammer in their house, although the relevance of this to the interview questions was tangential at best. He started associating with Gemma O’Doherty roughlybaround the same time she went racist but his old journalism in the Irish Times was not racist.
