The Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan told her mother she “just wanted to be a happy girl” in the days before she was found dead in a hotel bath.
Eileen O’Riordan has given heartbreaking details of one the last conversations she had with her daughter, who would have turned 50 on Monday.
Dolores died on January 15, 2018. The singer was found submerged in the bath in her room at London’s Park Lane Hilton hotel. Her inquest heard that she died by drowning due to alcohol intoxication.
Speaking on RTE One’s Sunday with Miriam O’Callaghan radio show today, Eileen said: “I don’t miss the rock star - I miss my little girl.”
Eileen said her daughter battled her demons for a long time but now believes she is at peace.
She revealed one of the last things the singer said to her.
Eileen recalled: “She was with me on the Saturday, I was very worried that time, I knew she wasn’t well. She came in and I couldn’t get through to her, we were always so close but I said it to her I felt like across her chest there was a block of ice, I couldn’t get into her heart.
“I got her two hands and I said Dolores I wish I could help you and she said ‘mam, all I want to do is be a happy girl’ - that’s the last live conversation I had with her.
“She rang that night and I knew she had been drinking, she hadn’t touched drink for three years but she was in great form and that was the last time I spoke to her at about two o’clock in the morning and the next morning I heard that she was found dead.
“Really she was so sick for so long and I tried everything to help her that somewhere deep down I said you are happy now, it was up to us now to handle the grief.”
Dolores struggled to cope with the level of fame at the height of her success according to Eileen who travelled with her rock star daughter on tour to take care of her three grandchildren.
“It was very hard to handle,” she said. One night I left her and I went into the little church to light a candle and I had no money and I had to go back for my wallet and she answered the door to me and she was crying and she said I want you to help me mam.
“And I said 'what’s wrong, what can I do?' and she said 'it’s no use, no one can help me now' - that was one of the hardest moments of my life. She found out she could go nowhere, she had no freedom, it was very hard at the beginning.”
The Limerick woman told of how fans from all over the world came to sleep at her daughter’s grave in the aftermath of her death but that she feels the iconic singer is “all around her” and not at her resting place.
“Sometimes I still think she is around; I feel her and I see her in everything at home.
“I have loads of photographs and pictures that are all of Dolores the rock star but her confirmation photograph, her little first communion photographs it’s those I treasure.”
The Cranberries enjoyed huge success in the 1990s with tracks including Zombie and Linger. Ms O’Riordan — who was also a member of alternative rock group DARK — had been working on a new studio album with The Cranberries in the months before her death.
The mother-of-three had been in London to record a cover of Zombie with hard rock band Bad Wolves when she died.
Sales and streams of The Cranberries’ back catalogue rocketed by 1,000 per cent in the days after her death.
