The extent to which this was a fiction would be shown within very few years, with both men and their parties consigned to the political margins by the electorate. But it was already obvious at the time to anyone who was paying attention to reality, particularly to the extraordinary efforts that had been made by the Sinn Fein leadership to bring militant republicans and the community that supported them into the political process – without a split that would have seen a return to large-scale violence.
Nonetheless, it was to the convenient fiction rather than the extraordinary reality that Bono lent his support. According to a biography of Trimble, Bono himself was looking for a chance to visibly ‘bring the two sides together’. As Bono told the writer, Bono said to Hume: ‘John, I don’t feel that our value here is to reinforce you with the nationalist community … It’s to reinforce Trimble with the Unionist community. If you can put something together, we’ll be happy to interface.’55
And so it was that newspapers all over the world featured a picture of Bono interfacing: holding aloft the hands of two ‘long-time enemies’, Hume and Trimble, who he brought together on stage in front of a cheering, mostly young crowd. ‘I would like to introduce you to two men who are making history, two men who have taken a leap of faith out of the past and into the future,’ he declaimed. Bono wasn’t the only one who deliberately mistook these two increasingly irrelevant men for the heroes of ‘the future’ – the same was done by that reliably misguided body, the Nobel Peace Prize committee – and it would be churlish to deny they played a considerable role in the Northern Irish peace process. They were widely regarded as the acceptable faces of the process, and Hume in particular had played an honourable role over much of the previous decade by insisting that the key to the process was involving Sinn Fein and its supporters rather than attempting, as in so many previous attempts at agreement, to marginalise them.
But as the summary photo-op of the whole affair, the crowning achievement of the peace process, the Bono–Hume–Trimble moment was bullshit, and it seems it was bullshit of Bono’s excreting. Speaking before the concert, the singer had reinforced his ‘triumph of the moderates’ message: ‘… to vote “no” is to play into the hands of extremists who have had their day. Their day is over, as far as we are concerned. We are in the next century.’56 A few years into the real, as opposed to the imagined, ‘next century’, the former IRA man Martin McGuinness was the North’s deputy first minister, serving beside the Protestant bigot the Rev. Ian Paisley, who had opposed the Good Friday Agreement: two of Bono’s hated twentieth-century ‘extremists’, going so amiably about the business of governing Northern Ireland that the press corps dubbed them the Chuckle Brothers, after a pair of British slapstick comedians.
Bono and U2 continued in subsequent years to distort the reality of that 1998 intervention. In their magisterial 2006 ‘autobiography’, U2 by U2, they incorrectly state that the referendum was on a knife-edge – Bono says ‘the signs were not good’, and Edge says it was ‘won by a very small margin, two or three points’, only after a Yes swing prompted by the concert. The actual margin in the North was more than 42 per cent. (In the same book Bono adds ignorance to distortion when he goes on to misidentify the republican dissident group who bombed the centre of Omagh town a few months later as the ‘Continuity IRA’, when anyone in Ireland who had been paying attention at all knew it was the ‘Real IRA’ – though even those paying attention might have found it hard to explain the precise distinction between the two republican splinter groups.57)
In another interview for international consumption several years after the fact, Bono called that moment ‘the greatest honor of my life in Ireland’, and called Hume and Trimble, rather ridiculously, ‘the two opposing leaders in the conflict’. He added: ‘People tell me that rock concert and that staged photograph pushed the people into ratifying the peace agreement. I’d like to think that’s true.’58 No doubt he would love to think it’s true. However, the ‘people’ telling Bono that must surely be extreme sycophants even by rock standards: of all the myths peddled by Bono’s supporters, this surely is among the most obviously and egregiously untrue, refuted by a minute’s fact-checking.
By 2012 the myth of Bono the Peacemaker had grown to absurd proportions, with his close adviser Jamie Drummond telling BBC viewers that for ‘most of the Nineties Bono was very involved in campaigning on Northern Ireland’.59 This notion would come as a great surprise to anyone who was actually involved in the peace process there, and one would like to imagine that Drummond’s ludicrous assertion would embarrass even Bono himself.
The famous Hume–Trimble photo-op, and the subsequent fate of its two political subjects, is sometimes cited as evidence of the ‘Curse of Bono’. It is of course nothing of the sort. Cynical people might argue that it is just another example of the extent to which Bono remained a conventional-thinking opportunist who could spot the shortest distance between himself and some great global publicity. Perhaps, unlikely though it seems, he was too dense to see the underlying political reality, and the inevitable ascent and key role of Sinn Fein on the Catholic-nationalist side and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party on the Protestant-unionist side; it’s more likely that he was smart enough to ignore it, because he was never going to be able to get it into a photograph.
WHERE THE CHEATS HAVE NO SHAME: TAX TROUBLES
The desire to make lots and lots of money – just so as not to be tempted to succumb to the love of it, naturally – and the desire to visibly embody All That is Good, especially in Ireland, need not come into conflict as far as Bono was concerned. Despite Mother’s shortcomings, U2 were routinely praised extravagantly in the Irish media for their ‘commitment to maintaining their base’ in Dublin – Ireland was so gloomy for much of the 1980s and 1990s that staying there seemed counter-intuitive. The economic benefits enumerated for Ireland of having the band continue to live, record and run their businesses from their home city were never especially impressive, however.60 They were a big rock band, but that didn’t make them a particularly big business in terms of, say, employment, and no one could say if they actually attracted a large number of tourists to the city, though many visitors who came did make a pilgrimage to add graffiti to their old Windmill Lane base.
The fact is that Bono and the rest of the gang had very good reason for maintaining their base in Dublin. As an Irish journalist pithily noted: ‘Up until 2006 U2 enjoyed extraordinarily favourable tax treatment in Ireland.’61 Ireland has famously had, since 1969, an artists’ tax exemption, whereby Irish residents’ earnings from artistic work – published work, that is, not performance – were not liable to tax. This exemption was established by the notorious politician Charles Haughey, when he was minister of finance. Suspicions about how Haughey funded his lavish lifestyle trailed him through his career, and finally caught up with him in his final years in the 1990s, when a long trail of secret payments to him was revealed; the artists’ tax exemption, however, was one of the reasons that Haughey went to his grave with a ringing postscript to an epitaph that was otherwise that of a scoundrel: ‘But he was a great patron of the arts’. The artists’ exemption not only protected the meagre earnings of most Irish artists, but turned Ireland into a minor tax haven for various foreign rock stars and best-selling writers, from Def Leppard to Frederick Forsyth. Many British artists positively went native, making films and records in Ireland and engaging cheerfully with Irish public