discrimination and segregation in jobs and housing to the historic splitting of the island of Ireland and the ongoing provocation of a British military presence – were largely ignored in favour of a generic deploring of violence. (The hypocrisy of this rhetorical pacifism was exposed every time its proponents refused to condemn various acts of violence by, say, the US or British government.)
The personification of this consensus was Garret FitzGerald, who served as taoiseach (prime minister) for most of the 1980s, heading coalitions between his own Fine Gael party and the Labour Party. Virtually every biography of Bono tells of his admiration for FitzGerald, who combined bristling contempt for Northern republicans (his response to a desperate delegation of hunger-strikers’ families was to ‘lay all the blame for the hunger strikers on the republican movement and to suggest an immediate unilateral end to their military campaign’27) with a determination to launch a ‘crusade’ to reduce the Catholic hierarchy’s influence over social legislation in the Republic. This was an alluring combination not merely for Bono but for a generation of Irish social liberals who saw the vaguely professorial Fitzgerald as someone who could lead the state away from the backwardness represented by Catholic nationalism.
But the hapless FitzGerald saw his crusade backfire in 1983 when anti-abortion activists successfully campaigned to have a ‘pro-life’ amendment added to the constitution, and again in 1986 when his attempt to introduce divorce was defeated. Bono and U2 were nowhere to be seen in either of these bitter referendum campaigns, though Bono had chanced an election photo-op with FitzGerald in 1982. In September 1983, just a few days after the disastrous abortion referendum, FitzGerald appointed the increasingly famous Bono as a member of a minor face-saving distraction called the ‘National Youth Policy Committee’, a new and (it turned out) short-lived initiative, chaired by a high-court judge but without any actual powers, that allegedly aimed to address the myriad social and cultural problems faced by young people in those recessionary times.28 One hagiographic biography of Bono, written long after the fact, suggests without citing any evidence that Bono resigned after a few months, in frustration at the committee’s bureaucracy,29 but there is no sign in the Irish Times archives of his doing so publicly, and thus embarrassing his friends in government. (U2 did not put all its eggs in one political basket: the hard-headed McGuinness was closer to the opposition Fianna Fail party – a fact that kept U2 close to the levers of power after 1987, when that party settled into government for twenty-one of the next twenty-four years; McGuinness himself would serve on the state’s Arts Council, an important funding body, for more than a decade.)
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
