The Frontman. Harry Browne

Singer Paul O’Toole – dressed vaguely like Bono, in leather trousers and sunglasses – stood outside the Irish department of finance, singing U2 songs with lyrics adjusted for the occasion by activist Sheila Killian:

      I want to run, my money to hide

      I want to build paper walls and keep it inside

      I want to seek shelter from income tax pain

      Where the accounts have no names …⁷²

      The campaigners were hoping to make a modest point about how tax shelters undermine efforts to build a more equitable distribution of resources around the world. When the handful of well-behaved activists on the street confronted the arriving minister for finance, Brian Lenihan, with their complaints, he seemed almost pleased that a little heat had been diverted from his role in wrecking the Irish economy and financial system. ‘You’ll have to take that up with Mr Bono’, he said with a discernible smile. (The only other recorded instance, by the way, of an Irish public figure calling the singer ‘Mr Bono’ came when the archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, introduced him in 1999 to Pope John Paul II – who proceeded to try on Bono’s sunglasses.⁷³ Archbishop Martin also mispronounced Bono’s name, so he was ‘Mr Bone-o’.⁷⁴)

      The global attention won by the small musical publicity stunt in February 2009 was beyond the wildest dreams of the activists who organised it: for days afterwards they traded stories of the far-flung newspapers that had reported their protest. Indeed, it was so successful in garnering publicity – all the coverage highlighting the Bono angle – that some of the NGOs that had lent their names to the ‘Debt and Development Coalition’ responsible for the action began to get cold feet: Bono’s ONE organisation, by then the main vehicle for his global campaigning work (see Chapter 3), was well connected, and with government cuts hitting their budgets they may have been worried about alienating a source of support, or they may have seen Bono as still an ally in anti-poverty campaigns more broadly.

      Bono was shrewd enough not to attack directly a group of global-justice campaigners for taking his name in vain. His response came quickly, more in sorrow than in anger, on the front page of the following Friday’s edition of the Irish Times – an edition that was festooned with publicity and special offers relating to the new album. When he might have expected to be revelling in hometown pride, Bono was instead answering vaguely difficult questions – albeit facing no real challenge with his answers.

      Part of his answer was evasive, and carried more than a hint of ‘don’t blame me’: ‘I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit’, he said, implying the others were to blame, and prompting knowing nods from those who had suspected that the tax move hadn’t been his idea and that his bandmates would scarcely worry if it caused him embarrassment. But he was not going to let it lie there: he was ‘hurt’ and ‘stung’ by the criticism, he said, and was prepared to return to his robust ‘all the corporate entities were doing it’ defence, with some ‘it was broadly good for Ireland’ thrown in:

      I can understand how people outside the country wouldn’t understand how Ireland got to its prosperity, but everybody in Ireland knows that there are some very clever people in the Government and in the Revenue who created a financial architecture that prospered the entire nation – it was a way of attracting people to this country who wouldn’t normally do business here. And the financial services brought billions of dollars every year directly to the exchequer.⁷⁵

      Helping rich foreign companies avoid taxes was indeed part of the story of the Irish boom. But it is revealing that in 2009 Bono was peddling the same line as in 2007 – ‘this is how the country got rich’ – without any acknowledgment of something else that ‘everybody in Ireland knows’: now that this get-rich-quick scheme had collapsed, Ireland was getting poor as precipitously quickly as any country in the developed world, at least until Greece started to unravel. Bono actually appeared to believe he was justifying U2’s tax-avoidance by referring to the Irish ‘financial architecture’ that by early 2009 was justly regarded as a national scandal. Even the reliably middle-of-the-road Irish journalist Matt Cooper was taken aback that anyone in Ireland in 2009 could talk about the country’s ‘financial architecture’ like it was a good thing: ‘Unfortunately, it was clear already that much of this ‘financial architecture’ had been built on very flimsy foundations and created many of the problems we are currently experiencing today.’ Bono, Cooper wrote, ‘is a citizen of the world as much as Ireland but when he comes home he might be best advised to just shut up and sing.’⁷⁶

      And it’s not only the Irish who might want to tell Bono to shut up. Credible research suggests that Ireland’s ‘financial architecture’ and ‘innovation’ – i.e. the exceptionally light-touch regulation and low-tax regime that brought so many murky funds to the Irish Financial Services Centre – were partly responsible not only for Ireland’s crisis, but for the chaos that gripped global finance in 2008, because its shadowy banking system had significant connections to virtually every important economy on earth.⁷⁷

      Bono had no idea, it seems. Clearly upset, he had more to say to the Irish Times, addressing his critics as though they themselves routinely benefited from shifting their money around various offshore tax havens: