Dolores O'Riordan

I recently watched a bit over half of the twenty minute video We've Completely Misunderstood Ireland's Most Popular Song from the YouTube channel Inside Irish Music. It's about the song Zombie by The Cranberries.

Dolores O'Riordan wrote the song and in at least one interview she says it's not really about politics, it's about a child dying. And that's possibly why this song that gets characterized as a political protest song did so well:

It was written by a woman and her take is personal, not political, and focused on emotion. She insisted the sound needed to be angrier than their usual sound.

I've always loved this song as someone who was abused as a child and struggling with the zombies in my head that don't want to die. 

I didn't really know much about Dolores O'Riordan before trying to research her for this piece and I still don't.

She drowned in a bathtub while extremely intoxicated. She was just 46.

And I learned she was sexually abused as a child and suffered depression and anorexia and she drank heavily and once attempted suicide. I will suggest that much of that was likely rooted in having been molested and left with medical issues causing her to subconsciously try to address them with things like alcohol and undereating.

Part of what helped me conclude that being RAPED at age twelve caused me to have some kind of PHYSICAL ailment of some sort that MADE ME suicidal is a story about a Dutch teen who was sexually assaulted at age 11, raped at age 14 and eventually took her own life because she was just miserable all the time and it was not getting better.

I wish the world was making more of an effort to protect it's children from sex crimes. I think you can sum up her death as largely due to the abuse she suffered decades earlier and, unfortunately, instead of blaming her abuser, she gets a lot of criticism for her so-called mental health issues.

Rumors that it was suicide lingered for months after her death. I'm not at all happy with the characterizations I've read in trying to do a little research into her life.

She was the main lyricist and co-songwriter of the band, and she also played acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, and piano. 

She was extremely talented and didn't deserve to spend so much of her life depressed and in pain, most likely both medical consequences of heinous crimes that occurred in her childhood.