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 life. Given the aggressive business mentality of U2 and McGuinness, it would be surprising if this exemption were not part of the attraction of remaining in Dublin through all their years of international superstardom.
As with any tax break, those who renewed it annually and those who benefited from it could make a case for the artists’ tax exemption, even as it hugely assisted a handful of super-rich artists, for bringing various ancillary benefits to the state – such as the prospect that you might meet Elvis Costello at a party or see Irvine Welsh in the supermarket. It certainly had the effect of encouraging artistic production in the country, if that can be counted as a benefit. ‘However,’ a journalist wrote, ‘the exemption for artistic income was costing the state tens of millions of euros in forgone tax.’62 Just thirty artists accounted for nearly 60 per cent of what was theoretically lost.63 It must be said that this was small beer compared to what was sacrificed for various non-artistic corporate tax breaks, and what was ‘forgone’ with the low rate of tax on corporate profits that had attracted so many multinational corporations to Ireland. Artists were a convenient scapegoat for Ireland’s tax-haven status, which in reality had little enough to do with the arts. But throughout the period of the Celtic Tiger, perhaps because in the celebrity magazines artists were so visible among Ireland’s conspicuously rich consumers, the artists’ tax exemption came under populist pressure. Bono’s name figured frequently in the discussion, its defenders forced to defend him, as in this newspaper report from a parliamentary committee hearing: ‘An artist like U2 lead singer Bono is “priceless” and, if he left, Ireland would lose an extraordinary economic advantage, David Kavanagh of the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild said.’64 A Green member of parliament defended the scheme, saying ‘personalities such as Bono [and others] may earn large amounts of money in a particular calendar year but perhaps not earn money in the previous year or the year after’.65 This parliamentarian displayed remarkably little understanding of how U2’s financial affairs might be organised: the last year in which Bono failed to ‘earn money’, and plenty of it, was in the 1970s. On letters pages and radio phone-ins, Bono was the national poster-boy for undeserving tax-exempt artists.
Thus it was that, in 2006, the Irish government capped the exemption for any given individual at €250,000 annually – a threshold that would be a distant dream for the vast majority of writers, painters and musicians, but one that was of immediate concern to U2. (The cap would later be cut still further.) The group responded quickly by relocating U2’s music-publishing arm to Amsterdam, where its royalties would be taxed at just 5 per cent, an arrangement the Rolling Stones had been enjoying for years. The news of U2’s new Dutch location emerged in August of that year to some general outrage in the media and among the public at large, mindful especially of Bono’s whiter-than-white image.
The band initially said nothing in public. The local grapevine suggested that if the move to the Netherlands both saved money and caused public embarrassment to Bono because of his apparent hypocrisy after all his calls for government spending on the Third World’s poor, it would be counted as a win–win proposition by other members of the band. This glee at the reeling-in of Bono’s ego would be enjoyed most, we heard, by drummer Larry Mullen Jr, who was annoyed at Bono’s ‘humanitarian’ globe-trotting, particularly the photo-ops with the despised George W. Bush and Tony Blair (see Chapters 2 and 3). But those were mere rumours.
Commentators picked up the public mood and entered the vacuum left by the band’s silence, with the most savage criticism directed at U2 in Ireland since at least the 1980s. Under the headline, ‘When the Band Has No Shame’, the by-no-means-leftist Hugh Linehan of the Irish Times recalled Leona Helmsley’s famous dictum that ‘only the little people pay taxes’, and continued by attacking U2:
When a special guest showed up for one of the band’s Croke Park concerts last year, the singer welcomed him from the stage. ‘I am aware An Taoiseach [prime minster] Bertie Ahern is in the crowd here tonight,’ he announced. ‘He has promised to give 0.7 per cent of our GDP to Africa and I urge him not to break that promise.’ He added understandingly that: ‘I know it’s hard to build a hospital in Abuja, Nigeria, when you need to build hospitals here.’ The crowd booed bad, mean Bertie and cheered the sainted Bono. Would the little people do the same today?
Even if you’ve never had much time for U2’s particular brand of bombastic stadium rock, you have to respect Bono for the amount of sheer energy he has expended on the Make Poverty History campaign. Remarkably, he has managed for most of the time to be pretty self-deprecating about it – no easy trick. As critics of the campaign have pointed out, it’s a bit, well, rich to be lecturing middle-income taxpayers about their government’s responsibilities, while you’re jetting around the world from one glamorous pad to another, meanwhile getting a third of your income tax-free. But if a key focus of your campaign is to raise the Irish Government’s level of overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of GNP, then it doesn’t look good if, after more than 20 years of tax-freeloading, you jump ship to avoid paying what many would see as your fair share.66
The Irish-born comedian Graham Norton, a popular presenter on
