To paint Bono in his proper Dublin middle-class Fine Gael colours is not to endorse those who were conducting the ‘armed struggle’ in Northern Ireland. Most people genuinely abhorred the violence of the IRA. However, it is obvious in retrospect that the ongoing campaign of vilification and demonisation of Northern Irish nationalist communities during this period deepened their marginalisation and made it easier to ignore the reasons those communities supported the ‘Provos’ (Provisional IRA). And thus it prolonged the violent conflict.
It is in this context that one can see what a faintly absurd statement of the obvious it was for Bono to introduce the 1983 song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ in concert after concert with the famous words, ‘This is not a rebel song’ – a ‘rebel song’ being, in Irish parlance, a pub-republican come-all-ye that denounces the Brits and/or celebrates the resistance to them. And yet there was a certain revisionist something-like-genius in the way that song – its writing started by The Edge and completed by Bono – appropriated republican ideas, including that of ‘Bloody Sunday’ itself, to create the impression that U2 were in some way the true rebels for the way they bravely rejected rebellion.
Bloody Sunday can refer to two events in Irish history: a date during the War of Independence in 1920 when the IRA killed British intelligence officers across Dublin, and soldiers retaliated by shooting into a Gaelic-football crowd in Croke Park, killing fourteen spectators; or an afternoon in 1972 when British paratroopers again killed fourteen unarmed civilians, this time after a civil rights march in Derry, in Northern Ireland.30 Thus the term ‘Bloody Sunday’ mainly denotes the idea, and reality, of brutal and indiscriminate state violence. The U2 song, however, says nothing about who perpetuated the scenes of carnage that it vaguely describes, and makes no reference to the state. Indeed, in its original form, in lyrics written by The Edge, the song started out with a direct condemnation of the IRA and, implicitly, of those supporting its members’ rights in situations such as the hunger-strikes that had taken place so recently when the song was written: ‘Don’t talk to me about the rights of the IRA.’31 This line is especially revealing of its writer’s ignorance, or at least his readiness to offend Northern nationalists: the innocent dead of Bloody Sunday in Derry were protesting against Britain’s internment-without-trial of suspected republicans; so in a sense Bloody Sunday’s victims, the apparent object of the song’s sympathy, had died for trying to ‘talk about the rights of the IRA’ – and of course of the many non-IRA members who had been picked up in violent military trawls of nationalist communities.
The group thought better of that ‘Don’t talk to me …’ line, which turned into ‘I can’t believe the news today’. It’s perhaps the most fateful edit of U2’s entire career, moving the song just far enough into ambiguity to ensure it would anger no one. The protagonist is someone watching the war on television, and the repetition in the song title conveys the weariness of someone observing a society that has degenerated into savagery. How long are we going to have to keep watching this, the song asks, with ‘bloody’ a curse that in Ireland and Britain commonly suggests ‘boring’ as much as it does ‘horrible’, as in the title of John Schlesinger’s 1971 film from which the track borrows its name. There are some portentous ruminations on the observers’ mediated distance from the events – ‘And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality’ – and a Christian coda after the instrumental break; there’s also some powerful noise coming from the band; what there isn’t is an ounce of insight, empathy or courage.
Writing in 1987, Irish journalist Brian Trench cogently observed that the song ‘turned part of the current war in the North into an anthem for no particular people with no particular aim’. Years later, Northern Irish academic Bill Rolston, in the course of proposing a typology of how songs dealt with the conflict, persuasively assigned ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ to his third of four categories, songs of accusation, which ‘condemn the protagonists’ but concentrate their ire on republicans. The song has even been read as first proposing, then rejecting, the ‘simple republican solution’ embodied in the phrase ‘We can be as one tonight’, abandoning that in favour of a militantly Protestant cry of ‘onward Christian soldiers’.32 One recalls with some sense of irony that this was one of a set of songs that Bono wrote in response to criticism aimed at his previous song-writing of ‘not being specific enough in the lyrics’.33
U2 drummer, Larry Mullen Jr, said in 1983 that the song was born partly out of annoyance at the pub-and-pew republicanism of Irish-Americans. ‘Americans don’t understand it. They call it a religious war, but it has nothing to do with religion. During the hunger strikes, the IRA would say, “God is with me. I went to Mass every Sunday.” And the Unionists said virtually the same thing. And then they go out and murder each other.’34 But you can search high and wide to no avail for an IRA statement to the effect that it was a religious war and that God would take the side of mass-goers.
Larry’s contempt for those who viewed the Northern Irish conflict as a religious war was lacerating, albeit confused. One wonders how he felt when Bono said, years, later: ‘Remember, I come from Ireland and I’ve seen the damage of religious warfare.’35
Despite the hostility to militant nationalism and the sense in ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ of distance from the events it describes, Bono was always ready to declare that the Troubles took place in Ireland, ‘my country’. This sounded less like united-Ireland defiance of the border imposed by Britain’s partition of the island than a means of conferring credibility on U2 for their proximity to and involvement in the situation.
And however one interprets ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, what is beyond question is that the song, and that (false) sense that U2 intimately knew whereof they spoke, played an enormous role in turning U2 into international stars. Bono’s own version of the story says that on the previous tour, for the October album, he had already begun deconstructing the Irish tricolour on stage: he tore the green and orange away to leave only a white flag, which became the constant prop for performances of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ thereafter.36 Whether that was the origin of it or not, the image of Bono marching to the martial beat of that song with a white flag in the misty rain at a 1983 festival gig in Colorado was part of the band’s breakthrough video on MTV. For those who didn’t know much about the Irish Troubles, it seemed that this song and the way Bono performed it were saying something terribly defiant about something or other of great, albeit obscure, political importance. And few people were prepared to point out that, in reality, he was defying no one except a beleaguered, oppressed community of mainly working-class people who were already under physical and ideological assault and were themselves looking for ways to break the cycle of violence.
By 1987, U2 were big enough, and the IRA bomb that killed eleven people at an Enniskillen war memorial was horrible enough, for Bono to make very publicly explicit that the song’s ire was directed at the Provos, as well as their Irish-American supporters. In a powerful US performance on the night of that bombing, featured in arty black-and-white in the film Rattle and Hum, he took a mid-song break to declare:
I’ve had enough of Irish-Americans who haven’t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home, and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! … Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want.37