tax loopholes. And then he’s asking me to buy a well for an African village. Tarmac a road or pay for a school, you tight-wad!’67
Even a top Irish concert promoter who had previously worked with the band, Jim Aiken, metaphorically burned any remaining boats he might have hoped to berth in U2’s harbour by stating publicly that ‘U2 are arch-capitalists – arch-capitalists – but it looks as though they’re not.’ He added: ‘I believe the ultimate charity donation is to pay your taxes in the country where you live.’68
U2, of course, continued to pay many taxes in Ireland, a country that conveniently continued to have some of the lowest personal and corporate tax rates in Europe. But, however unfairly, no longer would most people believe that their status as Irish tax-residents arose from anything more patriotic than the bottom line. U2’s complex multiple businesses were just doing their own version of the corporate tax-avoidance manoeuvre described memorably in the New York Times, when reporting how a company such as Google uses it, as ‘Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich’.69
Even a reliably establishment journalist such as Matt Cooper could write: ‘Critics of U2 pointed out that the band and its members had been able to increase their wealth dramatically over the previous two decades by reinvesting the tax-free profits they had accrued in such a favourable environment. Having made such a fortune already, how much more did they need?’70 Activists pointed out that, globally, the use of offshore tax havens by rich individuals had a huge cost in terms of lost taxation to governments in the developed and developing worlds.
However, all this criticism was somewhat dulled by Ireland’s general air of prosperity. In 2006 the Irish exchequer was awash in funds gained from taxing a still-booming economy, and what we were soon to learn was a dangerously bubbling property market. The outrage about U2’s tax move was tempered by a sense of satisfaction with the government, not least for the fact that it had forced Bono and the boys into its Dutch move by capping the inequitable artists’ tax exemption to ensure its benefits were enjoyed most by those who needed them most.
Bono was nonetheless sufficiently riled by the criticism that he eventually responded to it, while in Cork in 2007 to receive an honorary degree. ‘Our tax has always been not just to the letter of the law but to the spirit of the law’, he said. ‘This country’s prosperity came out of tax innovation so it would be sort of churlish to criticise U2 for what we were encouraged to do and what brought all of these companies in the first place.’71
Bono had no choice but to drawl a defence that cast U2 as just another corporate entity doing what corporate entities do. U2, we were forced to conclude, was a company like any other. But if this was a little painful for him, at least in 2007 when he said it there was still an honest, if somewhat blinkered, case to be made that ‘tax innovation’ had indeed been broadly beneficial to the Irish economy, leading to initiatives such as the Irish Financial Services Centre, where more than a quarter of the world’s hedge funds had offices. It wouldn’t be long before that case began to unravel horribly.
The morality of U2’s tax moves was suddenly under attack again in early 2009, due to a combination of economic hard times and an extremely clever campaign by global-justice activists in Ireland, timed to coincide with U2’s need to show their faces to promote a new album, No Line on the Horizon. 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
