Feckers (15 page)

The band’s two early-2000s albums,
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
and
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
, were disappointing for anyone who had truly tuned into U2’s mission. Confusingly, they sounded like great rock’n’roll albums should sound, even a bit like great U2 albums. But they didn’t sound like the albums U2 should have been making at the age they were, in a sequence defined from
Boy
to
Achtung Baby
.

The 1990s’ in-between albums,
Zooropa
and
Pop
, were essentially scrapbook albums of various experimental elements traceable to the revolution that had occurred in the band’s imagination at the time of the extraordinary 1991 opus
Achtung Baby
. But the subsequent albums cannot be excused on this basis, since they were produced at leisure and after considerable contemplation. In an odd way, they reflected the complacency and self-congratulation that crept into Irish life in the early years of the new millennium, when everyone became so pleased with themselves as to forget about the necessity for constant regeneration.

Of course, the idea that there was anything wrong with these albums may seem mystifying to many people. They were massively successful, and this is difficult to argue with. The trouble is that the ethic governing both these albums seemed to be more about affirming U2’s role as the world’s foremost rock’n’roll band than about the U2 mission as understood from the beginning.

U2 always promised more. They promised meaning and mission and undertook to liberate rock’n’roll from its modern obsession with the material. They said the world could go far if it listened to what they said. They gathered up a ragged medium and sought to reintroduce it to its own roots. They demanded of pop no less than that it grow up. Having started as pop-illiterates, they acquired an awesome competence which they emphasized was for an exalted purpose. They seemed to represent a defiance of imposed cultural notions and yet utilized these notions as the very fabric of their creativity. There was something here about redemption, about taking back the devil’s music, about wrestling the guitar from the grasp of the dark angel, about demonstrating some connection between inspiration and faith, reason and humility, love and rigour, hope and desire. It wasn’t just about giving God a good guitar sound, but about showing how some hitherto implausible connections could be extended into the stratosphere of the pop imagination, infiltrating the secular consciousness with something beyond the hip and the harmless. It was about giving a voice to things we all felt, underneath, but lacked permission to speak.

Those ambitions, though constantly implicit, tended to move ahead of the band, a vaguely defined but nevertheless deeply held set of aspirations that promised something extraordinary for those who stuck around. With
The Joshua Tree
and
Achtung Baby
, there was a sense that U2 were about to reach out and touch their very reason for being, and perhaps in doing so define anew the uncreated conscience of their own race. But the target kept moving and, more worryingly, U2 appeared not to notice. They kept talking about how music is more than diversion and about the possibilities of the medium to make a difference beyond the dance floor. And they kept on making music that seemed to miss the point of their own existence. That music was unquestionably U2, but when you took off the wrapping there was nothing there but the sentimental repetition of the unanswered question.

This crisis went largely unnoticed. Perhaps, though it seems unlikely, it went unnoticed even by the band-members themselves. Indeed, because the problem sounded as if it had arisen from an increasing atomization of the band, perhaps the very process of undoing conspired also to conceal the difficulty. The thing about U2 had always been that the whole was much greater than the parts. But the music they produced as they hit middle age conveyed a sense that what they embodied was no longer a passion born of friendship and ambition, but four individual forms of craftsmanship acquired in togetherness and now rapidly diverging. There was, in the predictable grammar of their newer songs, in the adherence to fashion and formula rather than the forbidden, a vaguely detectable hint that what each of the four was now contributing was less defined by the internal dynamic that had made the band great. U2 had become, to an extent, trapped in the codes they had started out trying to subvert. They no longer appeared able to access the collective recklessness of the early days.

This is what made
No Line on the Horizon
such a welcome arrival in 2009, a recording that at once consolidated U2’s position as the world’s great rock’n’roll band and reasserted their core mission to remind us that everything we ‘know’ is wrong. In a subtle way, without disturbing the core U2 sound or sensibility, it took us somewhere new. Bono was singing better on this album than he had for a long time, and seemed again to be at home in the sound the rest of the band were creating around him.

Perhaps, again, it is prophetic. Perhaps, for those who seek to look deeper, it is the continuation of that secret history of Irish culture. Perhaps. We can only hope that history is capable of holding the tune.

27
Gerry McGuinness

T
wo major events more or less coincided with the launch of the
Sunday World
in 1973. For one thing, that was the year that Fine Gael returned to power after a hiatus of seventeen years. The Liam Cosgrave-led coalition would become notorious as a reactionary and miserly administration, accelerating Ireland’s slide from the optimism of the Lemass years into the heart of a decade dominated by oil crises and the spreading radiation from the violence across the border. The other event was the retirement of Eamon de Valera, at the end of his second seven-year term as President of the Republic. But by 1973, instead of a nation defined by happy maidens and athletic youths, it was coming to be defined by comely boys like Marc Bolan and David Bowie pouting out from
Top of the Pops
. The firesides of the nation were alive not with the serene wisdom of old age, but the weekly theatrical deconstructions of existing values on
The Late Late Show
.

For decades, the Irish Sunday newspaper market had been dominated by two broadsheet titles, the
Sunday Independent
, and Dev’s own paper, the
Sunday Press
, which had gained circulation through being sold at church gates. Now there was a new kid on the block.

The very first issue of the
Sunday World
hit the streets on 25 March 1973. It was planned as a dummy run, and was being launched on a shoestring, but publishers Gerry McGuinness and Hugh McLaughlin were so pleased with the results that they had 200,000 copies printed and circulated. The first
Sunday World
sold out.

The main story that day was about the hunt for two Belfast girls who had lured a couple of British soldiers to their deaths in a flat on the Antrim Road. There was also a front-page piece speculating about reports that Patrick Hillery might return from his job as European Commissioner to succeed de Valera as president. The front-page pin-up girl, dressed in a striped, woollen mini-skirt, was a young actress called Jeananne Crowley. Inside were more pin-ups and full-page colour photos of, incongruously, pop heart-throb Donny Osmond and the new Cosgrave coalition cabinet. Although calling itself a newspaper, the
Sunday World
was really a magazine. It carried snippets about music, TV, films, gossip and fashion. There was a sports section and a few lightweight opinion columns. Politics was not a priority. In an early edition of the newspaper, in a piece about ‘the sexiest men in Irish politics’, the leading feminist Nuala Fennell nominated the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, despite the fact ‘his appearance at times reminds me of Noddy’. PR guru Terry Prone owned up to ‘a passion for Justin Keating’.

The editor of the paper was Joe Kennedy, an ex-folkie poached from Independent newspapers, he was a thoughtful and experienced journalist, once in the running for the editorship of the
Sunday Independent
. His favourite journalists were left-wing radicals like James Cameron and Claud Cockburn. The assistant editor was Kevin Marron, who had come from the
Sunday Press
. The paper also boasted one of Ireland’s most experienced and respected journalists, Liam MacGabhann, and a handful of interesting newcomers, including a young Derryman called Eamonn McCann. McCann was a socialist and political firebrand. But he wrote beautifully and passionately about politics, pop culture and the odd relationship between the two Irelands separated by the border.

To begin with, the
Sunday World
was actually a good newspaper, and then it got even better. It was at once radical and lively, containing campaigning journalism alongside harmless but entertaining commentary by people like Gay Byrne and Father Brian D’Arcy.

Under Kennedy, and later under his successor, Kevin Marron, the paper continued to publish intelligent and important journalism about prison conditions, discrimination, homeless children and so forth. It also led the way in opening up discussions about taboo subjects like homosexuality, incest and drugs. Sales were going through the roof. By 1981, the paper was selling 350,000 copies, way ahead of its nearest competitor, the
Sunday Press
.

Meanwhile, Hughie McLaughlin had been bought out by Tony O’Reilly, which meant that the
Sunday World
had become part of the Independent Group, owned by Tony O’Reilly. Gerry McGuinness, too, came to an arrangement whereby both his newspaper and himself were absorbed into the Independent Group.

Although O’Reilly was clearly delighted with the continuing success of his new acquisition, he never sought an input into the editorial direction of the paper, and according to one senior journalist, never as much as set foot in the office of the paper back then.

When Kevin Marron suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1981 (he would later die in a plane crash), he was replaced by Colin McClelland, who was preoccupied by populist ideas about crime and vandalism, which he described as ‘the evil and obscene cancer gnawing away at the roots of our society’. Before long, the
Sunday World
had come to be better known for its fearless exposés on ‘massage parlours’ than for possibly anything else.

There was a time when the
Sunday World
defined not just popular journalism Irish-style but may actually have been creating an idiosyncratically Irish tabloid sensibility by which Irish life and Irish ways might have been treated in a manner reflecting the country’s development as an independent but connected culture on the edge of Western civilization. This didn’t happen. The primary blame for this must be laid at the door of Gerry McGuinness. It was he who resisted the model of journalism pursued from the beginning by Joe Kennedy, which had arguably laid the groundwork for the early phenomenal success of the
Sunday World
. It took a number of years for the
Sunday World
to begin showing the signs of becoming the reactionary newspaper it is today, and in this drift it lit the way for other Irish tabloids to follow. In the end, the Irish ‘redtops’ became carbon copies of English ones. The model established in the early days by Kennedy, Marron and others was supplanted by the generic Fleet Street model, albeit without the irony and the wit.

As the paper softened, sales dipped, but not sufficiently to change anything. It continued to sell in truckloads. Having hooked readers with good journalism, the
Sunday World
moderated their tastes and expectations and supplied them with a diet that was cheaper to produce and less taxing on their brains.

The
Sunday World
set the tone and template for future Irish tabloids, like the Star, and for British redtops devising their Oirish editions. Consequently, and harsh as it may seem, Gerry McGuinness must therefore answer on Judgement Day for the present-day
Evening Herald
.

28
Mary Robinson

W
hen Mary Robinson ran for the presidency of Ireland in 1990, she sold herself as someone who wanted to restore national self-confidence and create healing between various entities on the island: Protestants and Catholics, of course; men and women; country and city.

As an arch-feminist, born the daughter of two Mayo doctors, she was somewhat behind the eight ball to begin. She had endeared herself to unionist opinion by taking a stance on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning from the Labour Party in protest. Other than making southern Catholics more suspicious of her, this had no effect on anything. And now she hoped to persuade an electorate comprising 95 per cent Catholics to make her President of the Republic.

Robinson was respected but not particularly likable. She had been a prominent lawyer, involved in numerous high-profile cases involving ‘women’s issues’. People thought her somewhat strident in a posh sort of way. She came across as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy rather than as a daughter of Mayo. She spoke in a slightly fruity accent, and dressed like a nun in mufti, nodding all the time as she spoke. She had a stern outward appearance. There wasn’t much crack to her. The fact that she looked and sounded like pure-bred Dublin 4 pretty much ruled out her chances of garnering votes anywhere else.