1990s rock band The Cranberries are experiencing a resurgence of late, thanks to their classic song Zombie being adopted as the unofficial anthem of Ireland’s Rugby World Cup campaign in France.
Many have bizarrely interpreted the song’s popularity with rugby crowds as a West British revolt against Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA, but in reality it is just a song that has been popular with Munster Rugby fans (as the Cranberries were from Limerick) for a few years now and they have taken it to the World Cup.
The backlash by some from the North or by supporters of Sinn Fein might be because they feel that it is some sort of riposte to the attacks on the Irish women’s soccer team and young people at the recent Electric Picnic festival, both of whom were criticised for singing The Wolfe Tones song Celtic Symphony with its refrain of ‘Ooh ah up the Ra’.
Some have shared Dolores O’Riordan’s comments about writing Zombie, which was inspired by the deaths of children in an IRA bombing in London.
What people are quicker to forget are Dolores O’Riordan’s strong opinions about abortion.
O’Riordan was strongly prolife, telling Rolling Stone in 1995:
“I’m in no position to judge other women, you know? But, I mean, . . . It’s not good for women to go through the procedure and have something living sucked out of your bodies. It belittles women — even though some women say, ‘Oh, I don’t mind to have one.’ Every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self-esteem, smaller and smaller and smaller.”
When Ireland was voting to keep or remove the right of people to be born in 2018, Dolores’s mother said (as Dolores had tragically passed by then):
My daughter Dolores . . . She was completely opposed to abortion. All our family will be voting no on the 25th of May.
Speaking of her meeting with Pope John Paul II, Dolores had said:
I was chuffed to see inside the place. But one of the best things was taking my mum to meet the late Pope John Paul II. She was blown away. He was such a good man, very kind and I loved him
