by Harry Browne
In moments over recent years it appeared that Bono might even be trying to learn something about how the crisis had played out in his home country. In the 2011 Hot Press interview cited above, he agreed that the Irish state paying off the (mostly foreign) bondholders in the banks that had destroyed the Irish economy was ‘an affront … an injustice to the Irish people’. (He is invariably allowed to generalise about these topics without any reference to his own historic business connections, such as with Anglo.) He continued:
I’m not an expert on Irish politics or the economy, not because I’m not interested but just because I’ve been so busy and so elsewhere on various projects, but there’s an idea going around for a referendum on the subject of what we should do about the bondholders. There’s two pieces: the sovereign debt and the private piece. It would be a very sophisticated thing indeed should the Irish people demand a chance to debate and argue, and finally decide themselves, on what will in the end be a decision that will affect their children and grandchildren. And surely this would also bolster the Government as they seek to reorganise, because they would have a very clear mandate on it. There’s a deep unfairness there.106
This sort of vague talk about separating private and sovereign debt, and finding a way to strengthen the government’s hand in negotiations with the EU and IMF bodies overseeing Ireland’s bailout, was commonplace in Irish punditry by 2011; but at least the quote shows that he had begun to recover from the tin-ear that plagued his defensive public comments in 2009, when he had notoriously praised the country’s ‘financial architecture’ at precisely the wrong moment. This was Bono restored to something like his previous status as outspoken advocate of conventional wisdom.
In other public pronouncements, however, it was clearer how perfectly that conventional wisdom was synced with the desires and priorities of global capital. In 2010, Bono used the occasion of a speech to the American Ireland Fund banquet in New York – fundraising for an admired U2-backed music charity back home – to make something of a spontaneous State of the Irish Nation address.107 That section of his fifteen-minute speech is a typical collection of vaguely crowd-pleasing essentialist generalisations about the Irish character, plus some pandering to Irish-America for its noble role, together with quite specific nostrums about what the country needs in its hour of crisis. It even opens with some archetypal making of his own origins-myth: the ‘two-up, two-down’ house in Ballymun, in ‘the bleak and beleaguered Sixties and Seventies’.
‘I mean the Irish are European physically, but spiritually we’re American. Or maybe Americans are spiritually Irish, I don’t know’, he told the crowd. ‘On an emotional note, the rise out of despair of the Sixties and Seventies that I was born into would not have happened without investment by American companies: Intel, Microsoft, Dell. A lot of us badgered our friends at Google to set up their offices outside of America in Dublin and they did. As did Facebook. And they’re pleased they did.’ (It is interesting that he claims credit for Google’s move to Dublin, but uses more circumspect language about Facebook, perhaps because he was known as a significant investor in the latter.)
This time he’s not mentioning the hedge funds, the ‘financial architecture’. No, the Irish devotion to innovation no longer has to do with devising tax shelters for multinationals: it’s all about software. And hardware. And the spiritual gifts they bring.
Irish people are great entrepreneurs and great technologists, not just because we’re a smart, young, well-educated workforce, but actually probably for more un-obvious reasons. Like … our bolshie, anarchic approach to life. We’re not buttoned down to tradition, we don’t respond well to orders … We challenge accepted mores. This can be bad, in that we stay up too late and drink too much wine at your dinner parties. But this is very good, if you want to hire us to write software for the twenty-first century. It helps to think differently.
He couldn’t resist one small bow to Wall Street, perhaps because of someone he had seen in the audience. ‘So take note, Dow Jones. You want executives in your company who think differently and are smart, educated, well turned-out’ – he pauses vaguely – ‘the Irish.’
Much of this was a speech he could have made twenty years earlier. But even Bono could not completely ignore the elephant in the room. ‘We may have blown up …’ He suddenly thought better about using the first-person pronoun, even in plural form.
It might have blown up, in our face. The economic bubble. And burst in our face. And we have made terrible mistakes that cost us what can’t be counted. But do not rule us out. Do not make the mistake of thinking we’ll roll over easily. We can take a punch, or ten, or twenty, but we can return them. We are relentless, we don’t give up, and we’re coming back.
He proceeded to indulge in a borderline-racist riff on the violence of Irish national sports: Gaelic football ‘makes American football look like synchronised swimming’; and as for hurling: ‘imagine giving fifteen Irish men wooden sticks, fifteen men whose idea of fun is beating the shit out of each other for an hour or so.’ It is safe to say that there were no Gaelic games at Bono’s childhood schools: this dismissal of hurling – in reality fast, skilful, often elegant, only occasionally violent – would on its own disqualify him from being taken seriously in several Irish counties.108
‘What I’m trying to get across is not how hard we are, but how vulnerable we are at this time. And I’m going to say it: we need your help. But’, he added, addressing some of the people perhaps most responsible for the global crisis, ‘the rate of return on investment will be considerable.’
If anything could sum up Bono’s relationship with Ireland better than his serving it up, seasoned with stereotype, for the profitable delectation of US multinationals, it might just be his eagerness to be honoured by the country’s historic oppressor – and the historic oppressor of many of the other countries with which he expresses his cod-solidarity. In 2012, he attended the ‘Royal Academy Awards’, part of the ‘diamond jubilee’ celebration for Britain’s queen, Elizabeth. With the by now familiar syntax in which he sort-of constructs himself as ‘the Irish’, he took to the podium to shower her with praise for her 2011 visit to the Republic: ‘Truth be told, the Irish are more fond of revolt than deference. But I wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge the extraordinary magic that you made on your trip to Ireland last year.’ Then he laid it on thick in the receiving line: ‘I hope you know really at a deep level what this meant to a lot of people … Did you have fun at all, or was it all work?’ He praised her too for speaking a few words of the Irish language, which he called ‘Gaelic’, as the British often do. ‘And the Queen spoke Gaelic. I can’t even speak Gaelic!’109 The latter statement is almost certainly true, given his upbringing and education, in which the Irish language would have been present but a low priority, at best. The queen, however, had haltingly spoken just five words of Irish, stingy even by her travelling standards, and, prior to Bono’s outburst, only the over-excitable Irish media and political elite had been so extravagantly impressed.
But perhaps all of Bono’s praise was mere payback for the events of a few years before, when Bono, citizen of a republic, was made Knight of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an honour many decent Britons have chosen to refuse. He joked his way through the 2007 ceremony with the British ambassador in Dublin, telling reporters: ‘You have permission to call me anything you want – except Sir, all right? Lord of lords, your demigodness, that’ll do.’110 Indeed he could not be called ‘Sir’, a privilege reserved for the queen’s subjects within the British commonwealth: the common British-newspaper ascription of ‘Sir’ to Bob Geldof is mistaken, though that error appears so frequently that it presumably does not arouse complaint or correction from Geldof himself. Bono, in any case, spurned the unachievable ‘Sir’ but accepted the honour gratefully, posing for photographs in his full silly splendour, making a peace sign while displaying in its open box the jewels of what Eamonn McCann rightly calls ‘a bauble signifying ass
ociation with the rape of continents’.
But it would be wrong to imagine that, among most of his Irish peers, this sort of behaviour brings odium upon Bono. He is, in this respect as in so many others, a perfect representative of a class that has long since made its peace with imperialism in all its forms and facets. As McCann writes:
Let us reflect on the fact that not one of a large and representative sample of Dublin writers, film-makers, business executives and freelance celebrities who assembled in the U2-owned Clarence Hotel to mark the pop-singer’s acceptance of this token of imperial approval managed to summon the half-ounce of self-respect it would have taken to stand up and shout, ‘Shame!’111
2 AFRICA
DO THEY KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS? BAND AID AND BEYOND
Bono’s emergence and status as perhaps the world’s leading ‘advocate’ for Africa is deeply strange, its history so contingent that it may be pointless to seek its origins in his Dublin youth, or anywhere else besides the 1984 phone call from acquaintance Bob Geldof asking him to take part in the recording of a charity single by ‘Band Aid’, the dreadful, plodding, patronising and very, very white ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
Prior to that time, the only evidence of Bono’s concern for the world’s brown-skinned peoples had come in a pair of songs released earlier in the same year: ‘MLK’, with words of no great relevance to the man with those initials, and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’, in which Bono bellows vaguely Christian lyrics that give way to a specific evocation of the assassination of Martin Luther King. The latter song has been proved by the passing years to be one of the most powerful U2 tunes, borrowing King’s martyrdom to boost its pounding affective climax. But the song’s soaring generalities also highlight the thinness of Bono’s early, right-on politics: the extent of the research behind it can perhaps be gauged by the lyric, ‘Early morning, April 4 / Shot rings out in the Memphis sky’ – King was in fact shot in the early evening. Years later Bono himself rather dismissed his lyrics as being unworthy of their subject, ‘just a load of vowel sounds ganging up on a great man’;1 but that hasn’t stopped him singing ‘Pride’ ad infinitum, including, with its erroneous lyric corrected, as the obvious passing-of-the-torch moment at the Obama Lincoln Memorial gig. (Bono’s capacity to deliver this moment, more than any ethnic box-ticking, accounts for U2’s presence at a concert where the Obama handlers wanted King’s shadow to be shaped in just such a vague, inoffensive way; according to Bono, and to his disappointment, not long before the gig the Obama organisers scrapped plans to play the ‘I have a dream’ speech itself as a lead-in to U2.2)
Why was the young Bono so interested, however vaguely, in King, and where does that interest fit into his wider politics? To some extent, attraction to King would have come as standard for a ‘self-righteous student of non-violence’ in the Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s. The Christian pacifism of Bono and many others in his time and place may be seen at least in part as a convenient stick with which to beat the forces then waging violent resistance against British rule in Northern Ireland. Why oh why couldn’t Northern Catholic-nationalists have stuck to strictly peaceful means of protest when faced with, first, discrimination and disenfranchisement, and then with violent oppression and ethnic cleansing in 1968–70? The existence of a tradition of nonviolence somewhere else in the world – however small that tradition might be on a planet of violent conflict – was enough, it seemed, to condemn any Irish person who had taken up arms. It helped that, in the 1960s prelude to the Troubles, the nonviolent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had deliberately appropriated some of the rhetoric of King’s American struggle, right down to singing ‘We Shall Overcome’. By taking up arms, the IRA and its supporters – a young Bono might conclude from the safe distance of Dublin – had turned their backs on this man of peace and all he represented.
But there is more, of course, to the place of Africa in Bono’s cultural make-up than a vague embrace of (some forms of) African-American resistance, and indeed more than a vague post-punk rejection of the most African-American elements of rock ’n’ roll (see pp. 64–67). Ireland – Catholic Ireland in particular, though not exclusively – had a long and profound relationship with Africa through missionary and charitable work. This is most often parodied in reminiscences about the little blue collection boxes found in countless shops and schools with pictures of the ‘black babies’ that your pennies would help; but hundreds of Irish priests and nuns had involved themselves in African societies at a deeper level, for better and worse, and many of them eventually came home. Brian Friel’s famed 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa – a Tony Award-winning Broadway hit, later a film, and probably the most widely discussed Irish drama of its time – features such a priest, Father Jack Mundy, just returned to his family in Donegal from Uganda, seemingly addled by the sun and full of suspect heterodoxies, especially about sexuality. Friel was not the first to draw upon the longstanding stereotype. This archetypal figure, symbolic of Africa as somewhere entirely strange and ‘other’, somewhere you go to help but then are yourself possessed and changed, may perhaps be viewed as something of a template for the way people in Ireland have come to view the peculiarly Irish trajectories of Geldof and Bono.
In addition to this history of missionaries, with all its shading, Ireland had other unique connections with decolonising Africa. The first foreign deployment of the army of independent Ireland – under the auspices of the United Nations – occurred in 1960: it was to the Congo, and a messier conflict than the Irish ‘peacekeepers’ may have been prepared for as they came under attack from Katanga secessionists. Twenty-six Irish soldiers were killed.
Ireland also had, in the 1970s and 1980s, a surprisingly strong African solidarity campaign, in the form of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement – one of the largest anti-apartheid movements per capita in the non-African world. The reasons for this strength were complex. The presence of South African exile Kader Asmal of the ANC, teaching law at Trinity College Dublin, was certainly a significant factor. (Asmal became a government minister in post-apartheid South Africa.) The proximity of Britain, where there was already a strong campaign when Asmal set up the Irish group in the mid 1960s, was also a boost. Ireland, too, had thousands of missionaries, and migrants, in South Africa.3 Finally, in explaining the strength of anti-apartheid politics in Ireland, you cannot discount the importance of a self-styled national liberation struggle in the North of Ireland: on the one hand, supporters of the IRA liked to emphasise its common ground with the ANC; on the other hand, radical and liberal opponents of the IRA liked to be able to show that they weren’t against national liberation and anti-discrimination struggles per se. (For similar reasons there was a strong, albeit smaller, Central America solidarity movement in Ireland, and in 1984 the active and tacit support for the South African and Central American struggles combined to forge, without Bono, a huge demonstration against the visit of Ronald Reagan to Ireland.) Eamonn McCann used to joke that the supporters of only the most faraway struggles had applied an ‘oppressometer’ to the various situations to determine that Northern Ireland did not merit the forms of resistance that they endorsed, however regretfully, when they were used in warmer climes.
The anti-apartheid movement could frequently mobilise hundreds and even thousands of people, and had cross-class support, including no shortage of leading politicians; it served as something of an antidote to any view that saw Africans simply as recipients of Western aid, without agency of their own. In 1984, before Bob Geldof conceived Band Aid, and then Live Aid, workers in a Dublin grocery store were forced off their jobs for following the advice of their union by refusing to handle South African produce. The ‘Dunnes strikers’ stayed out for two-and-a-half years, and became an international cause célèbre. Eventually support came from Bono, who invited them to join the chorus on Steve Van Zandt’s 1985 boycott-anthem, ‘Sun City’ – as in ‘I, I, I ain’t gonna play Sun Cit-eh’ and, better yet, ‘Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah, nah-nah-nah yeah’.
4
It is extraordinary, given that rich and complex set of connections with Africa, that an Irishman like Geldof could come up with nothing better for Band Aid, his effort to raise funds to relieve the Ethiopian famine, than the stupid, banal and offensive song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, its title alone standing as surely one of the most absurdly patronising sentiments in the history of patronising sentimentality, in the name of charity or otherwise. The song itself, sung on the charity single by a succession of top British and Irish acts, describes, in a series of clichés, the joy of Christmas at home and the suffering of Africans, and asks if the unfortunate latter even ‘know it’s Christmas-time at all’. (It is faint praise indeed to suggest that Bono himself might have done better: he was probably at the height of his artistic powers at this time, while Geldof had already fallen from his own more modest perch.)
The absurdly successful Band Aid single marked the beginning of Bono’s long and largely deferential association with Geldof. (In the acknowledgments to a recent book, Bono calls him ‘My Lord Bob Geldof’.5) But despite U2’s enormous international success by the time it was recorded in November 1984, and despite his compatriot being in charge, Bono has employed the story of the star-studded recording session rather self-pityingly, to emphasise U2’s exclusion from insular British pop circles – something of a sensitive subject, because U2 have rarely been English critical favourites. ‘Seriously, it was like a blow-drying convention. And we were an Irish rock band who had broken America. People … were just staring at us, as if to say, “You don’t look like pop stars.” ’6
