In this episode, Dara takes his time to say goodbye to Sinead O’Connor and speaks of her relevance to him from the early days of her career right up to more recent times when life presented her with a terrible burden to bear. He includes a clip from Ep 34 of the show when he spoke about the death by suicide of her son in January 2022.
Before he does that, Dara talks about his own recent mental health skirmishes, including being in the middle of a bad one while recording last week’s edition of the show. He argues for ongoing dialogue around mental health and self-care as a way of countering social discomfort in the face of mental unwellness.
Returning to movies, Dara discusses at length and in a spoiler-free manner, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Todd Field’s Tar, two exceptional character studies of singular figures, one historical and one fictional. He is left in admiration of the talent involved, the assured storytelling of the respective directors, and the films serving as an antidote to the superhero saturation that has taken over cinema.
The episode concludes with Dara attempting to do justice to one of his favourite Sinead O’Connor songs, In This Heart from her 1994 album, Universal Mother.