Sinead O'Connor sent texts to Bob Geldof weeks before her death 'laden with desperation, despair and sorrow'

The Boomtown Rats frontman dedicated the band’s performance at the Cavan Calling festival to O’Connor, who died at her home in south-east London last week at the age of 56.

Tributes have been paid to her by well-known figures across the music industry since her death.

Several gatherings have also been held in the days since O’Connor’s death where members of the public paid tribute to her legacy as a musician and activist.

On Monday night people braved the rain to pay tribute to the late singer in Belfast’s Writers’ Square.

Some held old news articles about O’Connor and tore them up while chanting “fight the real enemy”, echoing her 1992 protest on the US TV programme ‘Saturday Night Live’ when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II.

The crowd in Writers’ Square also sang her famous hit, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.

Geldof, 71, who grew up with her family and lived “down the road” from her, told the crowd: “Many, many times Sinead was full of a terrible loneliness and a terrible despair.

“She was a very good friend of mine. We are talking right up to a couple of weeks ago.

“Some of the texts were laden with desperation and despair and sorrow and some were ecstatically happy. And she was like that.”

Geldof added: “She tore up the picture of the Pope because she saw me tearing up a picture of John Travolta on ‘Top Of The Pops’. It was a little more extreme than tearing up f****** disco – tearing up the Vatican is a whole other thing but more correct actually, I should’ve done it.”

Ahead of the Irish concert, Geldof told Aine Duffy for Irish Web TV, that the band were “all very sad” following O’Connor’s death and had decided to play a number of their oldest tracks for the crowd as she was a “big Rats fan” and had gone to many of their gigs as a young girl.

He said: “Sinead lived down the road from me and Gary, the guitar player in the band who died about six or seven months ago, we are quite literally down the road.”

Geldof confirmed the performance at Cavan Calling was “definitely for Sinead”.