The truth was that this seemingly courageous, militant stance for Peace was no more than an impassioned dramatisation of the useless, war-weary but war-prolonging shibboleths of the Irish and British establishments, which cast the conflict as fundamentally the fault of a mad, blood-crazed IRA. In this respect, Bono Vox was no more than a ‘good voice’ of his adopted class, a young man whose career benefited greatly from the Northern conflict.
In a twenty-first century interview Bono indulged in considerable revisionism about this time: ‘I could not but be moved by the courage of Bobby Sands, and we understood how people had taken up arms to defend themselves, even if we didn’t think it was the right thing to do. But it was clear that the Republican Movement was becoming a monster in order to defeat one.’38 Such understanding, including an acknowledgment that Sands was courageous and the British presence in Northern Ireland constituted a ‘monster’, was, however, unspeakable and unspoken by Bono in the 1980s. Writing in the New York Times in 2010 as he visited Derry to see the British apologise for 1972’s Bloody Sunday, he was even critical of his younger self when describing his newfound respect for Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, by that time deputy first minister of Northern Ireland: ‘Figures I had learned to loathe as a self-righteous student of nonviolence in the ’70s and ’80s behaved with a grace that left me embarrassed over my vitriol.’39 His studies of nonviolence had nonetheless left him strikingly unconcerned about the violence of the state responsible for the very atrocity that he so blithely name-checked in ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ – the song for which he was invited to Derry that day.
His revisionism, in any case, should come as no surprise. In the years after the ceasefires of the mid 1990s Bono, U2 and most of the rest of the Irish and British establishments learned to speak a retrospective ‘peace-process’ language of respect, dialogue and inclusion. But it was not their native tongue.
And whatever the truth of the deconstructing-the-tricolour story, Bono would not always be so sensitive about the dangers of associating ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with nationalism, even violent nationalism. On stage in Madison Square Garden in October 2001, as the US dropped bombs on Afghan cities, during that song he ‘embraced the Stars and Stripes’ and otherwise ‘reverently’ handled the US flag.40 He didn’t tear it apart.
It was obvious by the mid 1980s, when Rolling Stone called U2 the ‘Band of the Decade’ – not an entirely obvious characterisation in 1985, since their five albums (including a ‘live’ one) had sold millions of copies but not reached any higher than number twelve in the US charts – Bono and the band had successfully used their Irishness as a calling card in the United States. Back home in Ireland, it was also clear that their American success could in turn be a route to domestic power and influence. But despite their increasing association with a liberal human-rights discourse internationally (see Chapters 2 and 3), U2’s interventions in Ireland were of a distinctly cautious and conservative hue. As noted above, they kept their heads down during the huge, and hugely divisive, referendum campaigns in 1983 and 1986, on abortion and divorce respectively, when Irish liberals were demoralisingly trounced.
Six weeks before the divorce referendum, however, U2 did lend their credibility and popularity to a local follow-up to the previous summer’s global Live Aid concerts. Especially given that Live Aid’s creator was Irishman Bob Geldof, and Bono had proved one of its most telegenic stars (see Chapter 2), ‘Self Aid’ was a predictable enough response to widespread populist grumbling about the readiness of celebrities, and indeed of ordinary donors, to help poor people in faraway Africa – Ireland had led the world in per capita giving to Live Aid – but not the poor on our own doorstep. The grumbling gained depth and resonance from the devastating recession that had taken hold in the Republic in the early 1980s. By May 1986, when Self Aid took place, there was anaemic growth, but no one would have mistaken Ireland for a thriving country, with Irish unemployment having hovered for years between 15 and 20 per cent, and emigration back at levels not seen since the 1950s, tens of thousands of young people, from a total population for the Republic of only 3.5 million, leaving each year.
But the organisers of Self Aid were determined not to see it become a focus for the country’s growing political anger. U2 themselves had already begun to be appropriated by politicians and pundits as a reason for the nation to be cheerful and encouraged; in the words of one historian of the period, they were seen as ‘proof that a better Ireland was possible’.41 Self Aid too, as it approached, began to look more and more like a star-studded, TV-friendly paean to the power of positive thinking. And while there were many big Irish stars involved – the Boomtown Rats doing their last gig, Thin Lizzy returning only a few months after singer Phil Lynott’s death, the London-and-Liverpool-Irish Elvis Costello – by now there was no doubt that Bono was the biggest of them all.
There was a groundswell of opinion on much of the Irish Left that Self Aid, with its emphasis on positivity and the ‘pull up by our bootstraps’ type of capitalism of much of its rhetoric, would do more harm than the little good it would achieve through fundraising for jobs-creation projects. In addition to a charitable trust that raised more than a million pounds, and to which community groups and start-ups could subsequently apply for funds, viewers were encouraged to phone in if they could offer employment themselves: thousands of dubious ‘jobs’ were thus ‘created’ by the concert/telethon.42 This sort of charade, critics argued, was letting the state and economic elites off the hook by suggesting that the economic crisis could be solved by some apolitical form of ‘self’ activity by the unemployed and employers, who suddenly discovered they could employ people and get their names on TV in the bargain. Bono hadn’t been especially noisy in the run-up to the concert, but as its most recognisable face he became the target for left-wing criticism as the day approached. Posters featuring Bono went up around Dublin and other cities, parodying the Self Aid ‘Make It Work’ slogan by declaring: ‘Self Aid Makes It Worse’.
The left-wing posters would have been insulting enough to Bono’s vanity – campaigners had chosen a less than attractive mulleted photo, though Bono had finally abandoned that hairstyle – but worse was to come. On the Thursday before the weekend Self Aid gig, listings magazine In Dublin, normally reliable in its support of U2, appeared on the stands with Bono on the cover. ‘The Great Self Aid Farce’, the magazine declared, constituted ‘Rock Against the People’.43 Inside, several pieces denounced the concert and singled out U2 for odium for allowing themselves to be used in this way. The polemics were led by the great Derry Marxist and journalist Eamonn McCann (then still a fan, later to become Bono’s most trenchant Irish critic), along with the magazine’s editor, John Waters (later to become an increasingly conservative grouch, and who rarely had another bad word to say about Bono).
Anyone who hoped that Bono might take the opportunity of the Self Aid gig to answer his critics by underlining his genuine radicalism – and there were still some in Ireland who wanted to believe in that – was to be sorely disappointed. The most political speech he made for the occasion came in the middle of a vamping little version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’: U2 were starting their ‘exploring the blues’ period, and were checking out how their elders and betters had done it, incorporating a bit of John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ in the mix. Because many young Irish people were emigrating to Margaret (‘Maggie’) Thatcher’s Britain, Bono reckoned it would be clever to present Dylan’s great, funny, devastating broadside about power relations as an earnest plea to be able to stay in Ireland rather than emigrate. In effect, ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm, coz I’m gonna stay and work on Garret’s farm.’
The result was the effective emasculation of the cocky anger of Dylan’s song, whose protagonist runs through a list of people for whom he will no longer work, making it clearer and clearer that they probably include every conceivable species of boss. Dylan’s rejection of any chance to ‘sing while you slave’ wasn’t clear enough, however, to emerge intact in Bono’s