Reflecting on RTÉ’s Meaning Of Life on her journey from northside Dublin to the White House and becoming a Vogue cover star, Sinéad Burke remembers a key conversation with her parents when she was 13 and offered limb-lengthening surgery.
Burke (34), who has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, was told it was her choice to make.
“I remember writing a list, deciding that at 13 the only reason I would be getting it done was to make it easier for other people to like me because I would look more like them,” she said.
“I decided it wasn’t for me, that if the people who liked me only liked me because I was changing myself, they weren’t my people. I’m so grateful to 13-year-old me for having the confidence to make that decision.”
Burke is now a regular in the front row of fashion shows for couture shoes such as Burberry and Valentino, but when she was a fashion-obsessed teenager she found beautiful clothes and shoes were impossibly hard to come by for her three-feet-five frame.
Sinéad Burke, wearing Gucci, at a film gala in LA in 2021. Photo: Getty
She began to write the fashion industry blog Minnie Melange to highlight the exclusiveness of catwalk designs and high-street fashion.
In 2019, when she posed for the cover of Vogue under the headline “Reframing Fashion”, she found it hard to take in.
“It wasn’t until the days and the weeks later, until I actually held that magazine, that I was kind of awe-struck by just the trajectory,” Burke said.
When she was seven, her parents — Chris, a little person, and Kath, a non-disabled person of average height — founded Little People of Ireland. It introduced her to a “cohort of friends of all different ages, of all different genders, of all different backgrounds”.
I was left to enjoy myself and it was one of the first tangible moments I remember in being a bit carefree
She recalled from her school days “acts of generosity” such as the caretaker “adapting my furniture the whole way up”.
But when she was training to be a primary school teacher, she said she found student nightlife difficult.
“There had been instances where I had been lifted up by strangers and I just didn’t like it,” she said. “People think they’re funny and didn’t realise that it’s a person and that it was dangerous. What ended up starting to happen was that I started to opt out of going on nights out. I have friends who are drag queens and they said, ‘Why don’t you come to The George?’.
“It was amazing. I was left to enjoy myself and it was one of the first really incredible, tangible moments I remember in just being a bit carefree.”
Sinéad Burke with Joe Biden in 2017 in New York. Photo: Getty
One of her greatest joys is her home.
“I have fully electric blinds, so I don’t have to reach to pull them down. I’ve thought about every single aspect of my home, so I don’t need help. The only place in the world that I’m not currently disabled is at home, and that’s a joy,” she said.
Burke is chief executive of Tilting the Lens, which was founded to address accessibility and representation in the fashion industry.
She also said she had all sorts of love in her life.
“I’ve been in love, I am in love,” she said, and added that she has also recently embraced the love she has for her friends.
The Meaning Of Life is on RTÉ One on Sundays at 10.30pm and on RTÉ Player