don’t mind an honest job
And we know things will get better once again
So a thousand times adieu
We’ve got Bono and U2
And all we’re missing is the Guinness and the rain
Reilly’s allusion was somewhat ironic, given its clear implication that the 1980s emigrants cared more for arena-rock than for folk-pop balladeers like himself. The song nonetheless joined the playlist in countless Irish bars in the US and elsewhere, and was a substantial hit in Ireland in a version by singer Paddy Reilly – reaching number one and still in the charts when U2’s ‘Desire’ overtook it en route to the top. Indeed, for all the awkwardness of its lyrics – yes he did rhyme ‘adieu’ with ‘U2’ – ‘Flight of Earls’ is more likely to get an Irish sing-along going than all but a handful of U2’s own songs, and even made something of a comeback among the new emigrants of the post-2008 era.
Bono was not a complete absentee superstar by any means. He lived in Ireland, and as an internationally recognised symbol of Brand Ireland, Bono could not resist getting involved when the Northern Irish peace process put Irish affairs in the global spotlight for the first sustained spell since the hunger-strikes. Since virtually all Irish-nationalist opinion, along with the British government and a substantial chunk of ‘moderate unionism’ in the North, was united in favour of the process and of the Good Friday Agreement that emerged from it; since elite figures in the American diaspora were on board, and Bill Clinton himself had shown strong, indeed disproportionately obsessive, devotion to resolving these Irish troubles; since there were no popular mobilisations in support of the agreement, North, South or among the Irish abroad (with their reputation for untrustworthy, uncompromising nationalism), and thus a dearth of images of enthusiasm; and since U2 had spent, by common consent, several years in the credibility doldrums with media-savvy political gestures in place of interesting musical ones (notably in Sarajevo – see Chapter 3) – for all these reasons and more, it was all too predictable that Bono would turn up for a photo opportunity at some allegedly crucial moment in the whole affair.
That moment came during the referendum campaign on the Good Friday Agreement. In May 1998, separate, simultaneous ballots were held in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to approve the new institutional arrangements for governing Northern Ireland. The result was never in doubt – more than 90 per cent of voters in the South voted Yes, and the referendum was approved by 71 per cent of voters in the North, with the opposition coming mainly from diehard Protestant supporters of the union with Britain (‘unionists’) who opposed the agreement as a concession to IRA terrorists and a step toward a united Ireland. The main political ambition of the British and Irish governments, and of most others on the Yes side, was to see the No vote in the North beaten into a minority not merely of the whole electorate, but even of the traditional unionist side; this sort of sectarian arithmetic had no bearing on whether the referendum would be passed or not, but it might conceivably affect the credibility of the institutions to follow it, themselves reliant on power-sharing via further sectarian arithmetic. The leader of the then-largest unionist party, David Trimble, was supporting the agreement, which had arisen largely through negotiations that aimed at including Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, in the process and in future governing arrangements for Northern Ireland. But the convenient fiction adopted for the occasion was that the agreement was a settlement between ‘moderate unionism’, embodied by Trimble, and ‘moderate nationalism’, embodied by the leader of the North’s Social Democratic and Labour Party, John Hume.
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
