by John Waters
But in his every public utterance as a politician, Gerry adopted a high moral tone about corruption, criminality and wrongdoing. He seemed not to understand the contradictions of his banging on about the alleged criminality of others when he refused to admit to his own past. He berated bankers, freeloading politicians and paedophile priests, demanding that heads be delivered on plates and keys be cast off the edges of cliffs. He did not blink once at the irony of it all. Adopting the ideological palette of a left-liberal politician, he pontificated about equality and women’s rights. He seemed to have forgotten all about Jean McConville and her truncated life as a woman and mother. He attacked the continuing campaigns of irredentist republicans as though he had never fired a shot in anger in his life. Even when he was implicated in a controversy in which his own brother was accused of abusing his daughter, who came out to say that she had told Gerry all about it many years before, Gerry did not break his stride in demanding the resignations of bishops who had failed to blow the whistle on pervert priests.
All this has had a gruesome effect on the stomach of modern Ireland. People could not help finding it strange that a man who had, to their certain knowledge, been up to his oxters in the blood of innocents, should now presume to be regarded as the conscience of the Irish nation. It made people want to throw up. It sent their moral compasses crazy. But still they had to listen to it, because Gerry was now a fully constitutional politician whose past was nobody’s business but his own.
26 Bono
U2 are more important to the story of contemporary Ireland than most commentaries seek to suggest. The standard analysis remains doggedly on the surface, celebrating the wondrousness of the idea that a rock’n’roll band originating in Ireland could possibly be regarded as the best in the world.
Little credence is given to the idea that U2, in their progress through the world, have unveiled a kind of secret history of Ireland. A deeper examination of their own history reveals a community of individuals who were somehow able to transcend the exterior climate of negativity and reaction, and to drive their receptors deep into the culture whence they emerged, acquiring a shamanic capacity to plumb the interior reservoirs of Irish creativity and genius, creating in the process a parallel dramatization of Ireland on the world stage.
In the 1990s, this became deeply infectious for their own people. Even that prevailing superficial idea of their world-conquering adventuring seemed to creep into the soul of their native land, provoking in their fellow countrymen a counterintuitive ‘Me too?’ followed by a defiant ‘Why not?’
But if we are to give them credit for in part inspiring the national reinvigoration that became world-famous as the Celtic Tiger, then we must also consider the possibility that, somewhere in the U2 story, there was also a portent of the unwinding of that miracle in the late Noughties.
When people find fault with U2, it usually tends to be about the extra-curricular stuff: Bono’s charity campaigning or the cartoon persona he’s fashioned for the stadium that is the modern mass media world. The first time U2 got on the cover of Time, over two decades ago, the ‘Rock’s Hottest Ticket’ headline provided their fellow citizens with an opportunity for an orgy of reflected glorying. Nowadays this kind of thing happens so often, we realize that Bono has not just outstripped the rest of the rock’n’roll pack and become far bigger than his own band, but has left his native country behind as well. This provokes a complex reaction in his fellow countrymen, which often comes out as resentment. And this, again, causes us to miss the main plot.
Much as it irritates so many people who insist that ‘it’s only rock’n’roll’, Bono has for some time been going bravely where no celebrity spokesman for his generation had gone before, earning considerable international respect for himself and his motivations, and offering an answer to the niggling question about whether rock’n’roll can move beyond its Dionysian obsession with sex, drugs and other false forms of freedom. These ambitions derive, whether we like it or not, from the Irish historical experience of wretchedness and want. Part of the reason Bono’s evangelicalism provokes such antagonism in Anglo-Saxon culture is that the experience he calls on has far more in common with the black societies in which rock’n’roll emerged than it has with the ‘white’ world to which Ireland ostensibly belongs.
The real problem, strangely, is with the music. In the beginning, U2 created a soundtrack that, in its innocence and innovation, retrospectively revealed itself as containing a prophecy of the shifts in Irish culture and fortunes. But then, deep in the 1990s, as soon as the prophecy began to take hold, something happened. It is as if U2, having discovered their essence, were struck down by the same condition that had affected their native country in their childhoods: a kind of retreating into a settled view of themselves, a solidifying around their own essence with a view to maintaining their brand and position.
The band’s two early-2000s albums, All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, were disappointing for anyone who had truly tuned into U2’s mission. Confusingly, they sounded like great rock’n’roll albums should sound, even a bit like great U2 albums. But they didn’t sound like the albums U2 should have been making at the age they were, in a sequence defined from Boy to Achtung Baby.
The 1990s’ in-between albums, Zooropa and Pop, were essentially scrapbook albums of various experimental elements traceable to the revolution that had occurred in the band’s imagination at the time of the extraordinary 1991 opus Achtung Baby. But the subsequent albums cannot be excused on this basis, since they were produced at leisure and after considerable contemplation. In an odd way, they reflected the complacency and self-congratulation that crept into Irish life in the early years of the new millennium, when everyone became so pleased with themselves as to forget about the necessity for constant regeneration.
Of course, the idea that there was anything wrong with these albums may seem mystifying to many people. They were massively successful, and this is difficult to argue with. The trouble is that the ethic governing both these albums seemed to be more about affirming U2’s role as the world’s foremost rock’n’roll band than about the U2 mission as understood from the beginning.
U2 always promised more. They promised meaning and mission and undertook to liberate rock’n’roll from its modern obsession with the material. They said the world could go far if it listened to what they said. They gathered up a ragged medium and sought to reintroduce it to its own roots. They demanded of pop no less than that it grow up. Having started as pop-illiterates, they acquired an awesome competence which they emphasized was for an exalted purpose. They seemed to represent a defiance of imposed cultural notions and yet utilized these notions as the very fabric of their creativity. There was something here about redemption, about taking back the devil’s music, about wrestling the guitar from the grasp of the dark angel, about demonstrating some connection between inspiration and faith, reason and humility, love and rigour, hope and desire. It wasn’t just about giving God a good guitar sound, but about showing how some hitherto implausible connections could be extended into the stratosphere of the pop imagination, infiltrating the secular consciousness with something beyond the hip and the harmless. It was about giving a voice to things we all felt, underneath, but lacked permission to speak.
Those ambitions, though constantly implicit, tended to move ahead of the band, a vaguely defined but nevertheless deeply held set of aspirations that promised something extraordinary for those who stuck around. With The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, there was a sense that U2 were about to reach out and touch their very reason for being, and perhaps in doing so define anew the uncreated conscience of their own race. But the target kept moving and, more worryingly, U2 appeared not to notice. They kept talking about how music is more than diversion and about the possibilities of the medium to make a difference beyond the dance floor. And they kept on making music that seemed to miss the point of their own existence. That music was unquestionably U2, but when you took off
the wrapping there was nothing there but the sentimental repetition of the unanswered question.
This crisis went largely unnoticed. Perhaps, though it seems unlikely, it went unnoticed even by the band-members themselves. Indeed, because the problem sounded as if it had arisen from an increasing atomization of the band, perhaps the very process of undoing conspired also to conceal the difficulty. The thing about U2 had always been that the whole was much greater than the parts. But the music they produced as they hit middle age conveyed a sense that what they embodied was no longer a passion born of friendship and ambition, but four individual forms of craftsmanship acquired in togetherness and now rapidly diverging. There was, in the predictable grammar of their newer songs, in the adherence to fashion and formula rather than the forbidden, a vaguely detectable hint that what each of the four was now contributing was less defined by the internal dynamic that had made the band great. U2 had become, to an extent, trapped in the codes they had started out trying to subvert. They no longer appeared able to access the collective recklessness of the early days.
This is what made No Line on the Horizon such a welcome arrival in 2009, a recording that at once consolidated U2’s position as the world’s great rock’n’roll band and reasserted their core mission to remind us that everything we ‘know’ is wrong. In a subtle way, without disturbing the core U2 sound or sensibility, it took us somewhere new. Bono was singing better on this album than he had for a long time, and seemed again to be at home in the sound the rest of the band were creating around him.
Perhaps, again, it is prophetic. Perhaps, for those who seek to look deeper, it is the continuation of that secret history of Irish culture. Perhaps. We can only hope that history is capable of holding the tune.
27 Gerry McGuinness
Two major events more or less coincided with the launch of the Sunday World in 1973. For one thing, that was the year that Fine Gael returned to power after a hiatus of seventeen years. The Liam Cosgrave-led coalition would become notorious as a reactionary and miserly administration, accelerating Ireland’s slide from the optimism of the Lemass years into the heart of a decade dominated by oil crises and the spreading radiation from the violence across the border. The other event was the retirement of Eamon de Valera, at the end of his second seven-year term as President of the Republic. But by 1973, instead of a nation defined by happy maidens and athletic youths, it was coming to be defined by comely boys like Marc Bolan and David Bowie pouting out from Top of the Pops. The firesides of the nation were alive not with the serene wisdom of old age, but the weekly theatrical deconstructions of existing values on The Late Late Show.
For decades, the Irish Sunday newspaper market had been dominated by two broadsheet titles, the Sunday Independent, and Dev’s own paper, the Sunday Press, which had gained circulation through being sold at church gates. Now there was a new kid on the block.
The very first issue of the Sunday World hit the streets on 25 March 1973. It was planned as a dummy run, and was being launched on a shoestring, but publishers Gerry McGuinness and Hugh McLaughlin were so pleased with the results that they had 200,000 copies printed and circulated. The first Sunday World sold out.
The main story that day was about the hunt for two Belfast girls who had lured a couple of British soldiers to their deaths in a flat on the Antrim Road. There was also a front-page piece speculating about reports that Patrick Hillery might return from his job as European Commissioner to succeed de Valera as president. The front-page pin-up girl, dressed in a striped, woollen mini-skirt, was a young actress called Jeananne Crowley. Inside were more pin-ups and full-page colour photos of, incongruously, pop heart-throb Donny Osmond and the new Cosgrave coalition cabinet. Although calling itself a newspaper, the Sunday World was really a magazine. It carried snippets about music, TV, films, gossip and fashion. There was a sports section and a few lightweight opinion columns. Politics was not a priority. In an early edition of the newspaper, in a piece about ‘the sexiest men in Irish politics’, the leading feminist Nuala Fennell nominated the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, despite the fact ‘his appearance at times reminds me of Noddy’. PR guru Terry Prone owned up to ‘a passion for Justin Keating’.
The editor of the paper was Joe Kennedy, an ex-folkie poached from Independent newspapers, he was a thoughtful and experienced journalist, once in the running for the editorship of the Sunday Independent. His favourite journalists were left-wing radicals like James Cameron and Claud Cockburn. The assistant editor was Kevin Marron, who had come from the Sunday Press. The paper also boasted one of Ireland’s most experienced and respected journalists, Liam MacGabhann, and a handful of interesting newcomers, including a young Derryman called Eamonn McCann. McCann was a socialist and political firebrand. But he wrote beautifully and passionately about politics, pop culture and the odd relationship between the two Irelands separated by the border.
To begin with, the Sunday World was actually a good newspaper, and then it got even better. It was at once radical and lively, containing campaigning journalism alongside harmless but entertaining commentary by people like Gay Byrne and Father Brian D’Arcy.
Under Kennedy, and later under his successor, Kevin Marron, the paper continued to publish intelligent and important journalism about prison conditions, discrimination, homeless children and so forth. It also led the way in opening up discussions about taboo subjects like homosexuality, incest and drugs. Sales were going through the roof. By 1981, the paper was selling 350,000 copies, way ahead of its nearest competitor, the Sunday Press.
Meanwhile, Hughie McLaughlin had been bought out by Tony O’Reilly, which meant that the Sunday World had become part of the Independent Group, owned by Tony O’Reilly. Gerry McGuinness, too, came to an arrangement whereby both his newspaper and himself were absorbed into the Independent Group.
Although O’Reilly was clearly delighted with the continuing success of his new acquisition, he never sought an input into the editorial direction of the paper, and according to one senior journalist, never as much as set foot in the office of the paper back then.
When Kevin Marron suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1981 (he would later die in a plane crash), he was replaced by Colin McClelland, who was preoccupied by populist ideas about crime and vandalism, which he described as ‘the evil and obscene cancer gnawing away at the roots of our society’. Before long, the Sunday World had come to be better known for its fearless exposés on ‘massage parlours’ than for possibly anything else.
There was a time when the Sunday World defined not just popular journalism Irish-style but may actually have been creating an idiosyncratically Irish tabloid sensibility by which Irish life and Irish ways might have been treated in a manner reflecting the country’s development as an independent but connected culture on the edge of Western civilization. This didn’t happen. The primary blame for this must be laid at the door of Gerry McGuinness. It was he who resisted the model of journalism pursued from the beginning by Joe Kennedy, which had arguably laid the groundwork for the early phenomenal success of the Sunday World. It took a number of years for the Sunday World to begin showing the signs of becoming the reactionary newspaper it is today, and in this drift it lit the way for other Irish tabloids to follow. In the end, the Irish ‘redtops’ became carbon copies of English ones. The model established in the early days by Kennedy, Marron and others was supplanted by the generic Fleet Street model, albeit without the irony and the wit.
As the paper softened, sales dipped, but not sufficiently to change anything. It continued to sell in truckloads. Having hooked readers with good journalism, the Sunday World moderated their tastes and expectations and supplied them with a diet that was cheaper to produce and less taxing on their brains.
The Sunday World set the tone and template for future Irish tabloids, like the Star, and for British redtops devising their Oirish editions. Consequently, and harsh as it may seem, Gerry McGuinness must therefore answer on Judgement Day for the present-day Even
ing Herald.
28 Mary Robinson
When Mary Robinson ran for the presidency of Ireland in 1990, she sold herself as someone who wanted to restore national self-confidence and create healing between various entities on the island: Protestants and Catholics, of course; men and women; country and city.
As an arch-feminist, born the daughter of two Mayo doctors, she was somewhat behind the eight ball to begin. She had endeared herself to unionist opinion by taking a stance on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning from the Labour Party in protest. Other than making southern Catholics more suspicious of her, this had no effect on anything. And now she hoped to persuade an electorate comprising 95 per cent Catholics to make her President of the Republic.
Robinson was respected but not particularly likable. She had been a prominent lawyer, involved in numerous high-profile cases involving ‘women’s issues’. People thought her somewhat strident in a posh sort of way. She came across as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy rather than as a daughter of Mayo. She spoke in a slightly fruity accent, and dressed like a nun in mufti, nodding all the time as she spoke. She had a stern outward appearance. There wasn’t much crack to her. The fact that she looked and sounded like pure-bred Dublin 4 pretty much ruled out her chances of garnering votes anywhere else.
Robinson said that she wanted to ‘change’ Ireland, but change it into something that, she implied, it wished to become. She sought to reassure people that she was not some left-wing Trojan horse, some fire-eating feminist dragon who, if she won, would seek to claim a famous victory over ‘the forces of conservatism’. One of the senior Labour Party people involved in her campaign afterwards described it as being like a train with lots of different carriages filled with different kinds of people. The trick was not to let people in any one carriage know who was in the others. To have any hope of being elected, she would have to gain votes not just from the left-liberal constituency, but from across the spectrum, all over the country.
