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VOICES
Surrealing in the Years Legacy Bill apparently not as juicy as three old men
I was supposed to be off this week.
I WAS SUPPOSED to be off this week. I’m not even supposed to be here.
Technically, I’m doing this for free right now. But I’m glad to do it. You know why? Because somebody’s got to chronicle the freakshow. Somebody needs to be on-call to document our latest descent into whatever passes for public discourse these days. And my oh my, what a week we’ve had on that front.
To start, let me take a note out of my How To Be An Irish Columnist handbook by blaming The Wolfe Tones.
If those old men weren’t so damn popular then we wouldn’t have had such a weird week and I could have gone about my time off in the usual fashion (none of your business).
Instead, the Irish trad-folk-ballad band (people get angry at me no matter which designation I use! What do you want from me? They play all of those types of music!) performed to a crowd of 10,000. It was a record attendance at Electric Picnic’s Electric Arena and yes, at one stage, the crowd did start chanting “Ooh ah, up the ‘Ra” at the end of Celtic Symphony. That’s how the song goes.
One headline about this incident, and you can cartoonishly rub your eyes all you like but this is what it really said, read: ‘Why do kids sing ‘Up the Ra’ and not ‘Up Al Qa’ida’?’
I don’t have children, but I could feel the sigh of relief from parents around the country now that someone was finally asking the question on their lips: why don’t the kids sing more songs about Al Qaeda? It’s a fair question! Let her finish!
The answer to Independent columnist Sarah Carey and her headline writer’s rhetorical gambit is apparently “Because Sinn Féin has won”, which, now that I’ve typed it out, actually leads to more questions than answers. Is the implication that if Sinn Féin hadn’t “won” (won what?) that our children would be singing songs lionising the notorious emir Ayman al-Zawahiri? Are us columnists allowed to just mention Al Qaeda whenever we feel like it? Because I’ll do it if it’ll make you happy.
The concert also posed a severe conundrum to Joe Duffy on Liveline, who told Wolfe Tones singer Brian Warfield: “I think your music is awful, brutal old rubbish. Even Sinn Féin, don’t sing ‘ooh ah, up the Ra’ now. They have moved on.” On Newstalk, Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman spoke about the dangers of romanticising the Troubles. Kelly said that The Good Friday Agreement was like “ancient history” for young people, and each presenter chalked the occasion up to the general foolishness of youth.
At some point, somebody needs to study the correlation between sitting in front of a radio microphone for money and being mystified by things at large. Something seems to happen once you lock yourself in a little radio booth for somewhere between one and three hours of a weekday where, all of a sudden, relatively commonplace behaviours begin to confuse you. You can no longer even fathom the idea that the mechanics of a situation are more multifaceted than your own instinctual diagnosis.
Could it be that The Wolfe Tones and the Troubles-era IRA are not necessarily synonymous? More viral even than the chanting was the band’s rendition of Grace – a rebel song of a different kind and of a different time, but no less a song about one of the slain leaders of the 1916 Rising. Could it be that The Wolfe Tones have, in actual fact, been very popular for no less than 60 years; that they have fans of all ages; that the video footage from the gig actively shows a wide range of ages? Indeed, so mainstream are they that every Ireland fan will be familiar with We’re On The One Road, a song that plays before every single Ireland match at the Aviva Stadium.
No. It is simply a mystery. It is the inscrutable minds of children once again defying the good faith efforts of the noble talk radio disc jockeys. They’d really like to understand, but unfortunately, that’s not possible. Though – if you would like more analysis on the matter – you could read this.
The nonsense discourse would probably not have been cast in such sharp relief had it not coincided with the passing of the controversial Legacy Bill through the House of Commons, a bill which ends the prospect of prosecution for any military personnel who could have come under investigation for killings during The Troubles. The bill has been opposed by all of the main parties in Northern Ireland.
Those who think that young people are disengaged from the reality of the violence in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century would do well to examine the flood of social media outrage over the law, and in doing so engage further with the reasons beyond the recklessness of youth that music like The Wolfe Tones’ has seen a recent surge in popularity. In case you’re wondering, Liveline has not run a segment on the Legacy Bill at the time of filing.
It had been an interesting week. I wanted to write about it. But what really cinched it for me – what really made it non-negotiable – was when Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary was hit with two creampies. Did you think under any circumstances that I would simply allow the weekend to pass by without commenting on the fact that Michael O’Leary got creampied? No. That’s what this column is here for.
O’Leary was in the middle of a one-man protest outside the European Commission against repeated air traffic controllers’ strikes in the EU when he got big-timed pied not once, but twice.
Ever the showman, O’Leary took the pieing well, tasting some of the dessert and telling reporters that it was delicious. However, in the spirit of this week’s column, we must be careful not to glorify such acts.
