Let C be a smooth projective curve of genus $2$ . Following a method by O’Grady, we construct a semismall desingularisation $\tilde {\mathcal {M}}_{Dol}^G$ of the moduli space $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ of semistable G-Higgs bundles of degree 0 for $G=\mathrm {GL}(2,\mathbb {C}), \mathrm {SL}(2,\mathbb {C})$ . By the decomposition theorem of Beilinson, Bernstein and Deligne, one can write the cohomology of $\tilde {\mathcal {M}}_{Dol}^G$ as a direct sum of the intersection cohomology of $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ plus other summands supported on the singular locus. We use this splitting to compute the intersection cohomology of $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ and prove that the mixed Hodge structure on it is pure, in analogy with what happens to ordinary cohomology in the smooth case of coprime rank and degree.