YOU know Ireland really is a funny little country. The Labour Party, having jettisoned their leader in the middle of government, the man who also happens to be the Tánaiste, elected a new leader and there was a subsequent re-shuffle of the Fine Gael-Labour cabinet.
It transpires though that this change of Ministers, of the main personnel who run the country, was delayed not so much by inter-party wrangling or by political trading but by the future of a country and western singer’s concerts.
The Garth Brooks Croke Park fiasco has been of such headline importance here that he couldn’t get any more publicity even if the shows go ahead. Not since the days of Albert Reynolds has Country and Western played such a pivotal role in Irish life.
The general opinion is that it was all fairly typical of the way things get done in Ireland, from tickets sold before the licence to perform was arranged, to the GAA unable to resist just one more payday, one more gig. They don’t call a drawn Championship game a GAA result for nothing.
On the other side of this were the residents, some of whom seemed utterly shocked to realise they were living next door to Ireland’s biggest sporting venue and might have to put up with some occasional inconvenience. In an age of perpetual outrage the objections of some of them were a bit hard to bear. If you buy a house by Croke Park you know what’s coming with it, don’t you?
And, of course, some of those involved reached for exaggeration the way a swimmer reaches for oxygen, though the habit of ridiculous exaggeration is increasingly out and about anyway. So a few weeks after a Senator in the Senate called some government shenanigans in the Dáil something Hitler would have been ashamed of, those who opposed the concerts were accused of being unpatriotic.
Unpatriotic because Ireland is first and foremost an economy, you know, and losing the five concerts is to lose a lot of money. Unpatriotic because of the damage being done to our international reputation. Unpatriotic in Ireland because you don’t want a country and western singer to perform. This really is a funny little country.
So, for all that those Croke Park residents knew what they were getting on account of where they live it seems by this way of thinking that they have no grounds for objection.
No grounds for objection not because they should expect this because of their address. No grounds for objection because they were never expecting five nights of disruption and noise. No grounds for objection because they would have a summer of matches and concerts dominating their lives. None of that matters.
They have no grounds for objection because that might affect the economy and therefore there are no other issues. No issues of fairness, residents’ rights, or broken promises. When it comes to the economy there can be no other issues. The economy trumps everything.
So not only do we have the ludicrous conflation of a Garth Brooks’ concert into major news, we have the Celtic Tiger philosophy of Ireland as an economy, not a country, wheeled out in defence of those who only ever think money has rights. Not people. It was silly and then it was ugly.
As a distraction it’s fairly harmless. As a means by which the Celtic Tiger failings of patriotism and the economy above all are still prevalent, it’s quite disturbing. Not only that but some people are suggesting that in order to accommodate Garth Brooks the Government should merely change the planning laws, which is where we came in, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what got us in to trouble anyway? A rich person wants something so we change the planning laws accordingly. I’ve heard that story before.
We are being told that there has been severe damage done to our international reputation by the Garth Brooks fiasco, that this will not just be seen as a daft summer news story but as a reason not to do business in Ireland. I find that hard to believe, a sob story a country and western tune couldn’t even carry off.
If anything comes out of this story though it is that there are still plenty of those out there in Ireland who think bringing patriotism and the economy in to any argument trumps everything else.
They are stuck in a failed Celtic Tiger way of thinking. For them nothing has changed. For them, sorry, tomorrow never came.
