The Trib (12 page)

Eventually, the gates opened and everything turned out okay, just like at Punchestown. But it doesn't take much to change a happy experience into a tragedy.

Festivals and open-air concerts are a big feature of the summertime. Oxegen is on next weekend and I hope that many thousands will have a wonderful time. I hope that there is no repeat of the chaos of Punchestown or Slane.

I love going to concerts with my kids. Usually we have a great time, despite the over-priced merchandising and the dire food.

However, after Punchestown I am going to give open-air gigs a miss. I don't trust them. I never again want to stand in a field and feel that I can't protect my kids. I don't ever want to feel like a ripped-off, tossed-away, worthless specimen of humanity just because someone somewhere took my money and then couldn't be bothered to organise the buses home.

3 January 2010

A
week before Christmas I received a surprise email from the producers of
Killing Bono,
a new film based on Neil McCormick's memoir of life as Bono's best friend. I had visions of being offered a part in the film or being hired as a consultant. There is nothing like a brush with Hollywood to perk up a person's day.

Instead they just wanted permission to use an original 1978 poster of my band, Rocky de Valera and the Gravediggers, as background in some scenes set in Howth. Fame at last, if only as a fleeting image on the wall of someone else's film.

The poster shows six unkempt student types posing in the loo of the Belfield Bar in January 1978 – wannabes with a big new year's resolution to become the next Boomtown Rats. Though inspired by the energy and DIY attitude of the punks, most of us looked more like rejects from the film
Woodstock
than future new wave icons. Still, we took ourselves darned seriously. We spent as much time choosing stage names as we did rehearsing. I devoted inordinate energy to finding a suitable eye-patch for my image. Such attention to detail surely meant that our success was predestined. However, like most new year's resolutions, it failed. The line-up kept changing. By the end of 1980, all of the dreams had petered out and the band folded as though someone had put it in a drawer.

However, we had played a dozen gigs as headliners at Howth Community Centre, where Neil McCormick and his guitar-playing brother Ivan's band, Yeah Yeah, had often played support. The headlining gig was later taken over by U2 and we all know what happened to them.

Now Neil McCormick, ex-
Hot Press
hack and failed rock star, is destined to have his moment of fame on the big screen with a screenplay courtesy of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who penned
The Commitments
and
Lovejoy
and who created
Porridge
and
The Likely Lads.
I remember Neil as an exuberant, speccy geek – he could have stepped out of the movie
Superbad
– and a chatterbox who seemed to be an expert on any subject under discussion. I had no idea that he was Bono's best mate. But then, once U2 had hit the big time, Dublin's pubs teemed with people who claimed to be Bono's pal.

McCormick, though, was the real deal and his memoir,
I Was Bono's Doppelganger
(retitled
Killing Bono
for the US market), is an honest, often painfully funny account of failing in the music business while enviously watching as his best friend's band becomes the biggest thing in rock.

I had mixed feelings when I read McCormick's book. I knew many of the people who were featured and I grudgingly related to the cartoonish but probably deadly accurate portrait of myself that appears fleetingly in a couple of chapters. Somehow it felt as though my teenage dreams of rock stardom had been hijacked. The book depicts a Howth that seemed about to become the epicentre of the rock universe. It was the world of my youth, and now Neil McCormick had made it accessible to everyone.

But I can't really complain. Howth has been on the silver screen before and I was partly responsible.
The Last of the High Kings
, based on my own coming-of-age novel and starring Gabriel Byrne, Jared Leto and Christina Ricci, was filmed in Howth in 1995. In a curious twist, Jared Leto has recently renounced Hollywood fame to become a rock star. He is now lead singer in his brother's band, 30 Seconds to Mars. Unlike other Hollywood rock wannabes such as Juliette Lewis and Keanu Reeves, Leto has made a decent fist of rock stardom and 30 Seconds are one of the hottest tickets on the planet. Just goes to show the power and allure of rock and roll.

It's perhaps fitting that McCormick's story is being filmed in January, a time when people make new year's resolutions and set out to change themselves for the better. Indeed, the new year seems to be the only time in the year when optimism becomes mandatory and people allow themselves ‘what if' moments. What if I lost weight? What if I kept a tighter control of my money? What if I finally learned to play the guitar?

Except it's not really about losing weight or learning a musical instrument, is it? It's the one time in the year when we feel we can start anew, when we can reinvent ourselves, feel free to pursue a dream; when it's okay to think big.

But new year's resolutions, like rock dreams, rarely last. Statistics show that only around 40 per cent of people maintain their resolutions past January.

McCormick's story just goes to prove that you should never give up. Because even if the new film flops, McCormick is now a successful author as well as something of an official biographer to Bono and the lads. In a peculiar way, his rock dream has come true.

Each of the wannabe rockers from the 1978 poster turned away from music to carve out different careers for themselves. But I bet that, deep down, most of us would jump at the chance to become a rock star. However unrealistic they may seem, dreams give you something to aim for. And dreams can come true, but just not in the way you expect.

October 11, 2009

C
eann Comhairle John O'Donoghue leaves office on Tuesday, but he remains light years away from the transformed politician the electorate would like to see. He is not a man humbled by a moment of epiphany that allowed him to understand the ethical error of his ways. Far from it.

He is seething, resentful at having had to suffer the pain of public humiliation and, above all, angry that he was not allowed to have his say, to ‘explain' just how he racked up a travel bill of over €100,000 in two years as Ceann Comhairle on top of his generous unvouched expenses, or just why, in this apolitical office, he needed to treble the size of his personal staff. (Never mind the fact this newspaper asked, asked and asked again for him to give his side of the story, only to meet with the worst sort of evasion, that of hiding behind the ‘constitutional' bar on his making any sort of political statement. Mind you, he did send us a solicitor's letter claiming our coverage was ‘inaccurate, misleading, exaggerated and disingenuous' and threatening to take further steps against us.)

Equally angry are, to their great discredit, his Fianna Fáil ministerial colleagues. To Willie O'Dea, Micheál Martin, Conor Lenihan and Brian Lenihan – to the Taoiseach – the Bull is a scapegoat, a lightning rod for anger, a fall guy for public fury that these days seems beyond persuasion by reasonable argument. He has been felled by grave-dancers who wouldn't wait for due process and whose only motive was to enhance their own standing in the eyes of a media-hyped public ravening for a scalp.

Of course, they are astute and pragmatic enough to realise the political momentum was against their former cabinet colleague and they knew O'Donoghue had to go. But why? Unfortunately for democracy in this country, they still don't get it.

Their gut instinct has been to deflect blame away from what is wrong with the way the Dáil is run and to try to discredit Eamon Gilmore for doing what the electorate and every scared FF backbencher wanted: looking John O'Donoghue straight in the eye and telling him that his position was untenable and that he had to go.

The consequence has been a week of sour self-justification and bitterness between parties that disgusts the electorate as much as the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by O'Donoghue. The Ceann Comhairle was, as we all knew well, not alone in the level of indulgence he enjoyed. As we reveal today, the depressingly long line-up of cabinet colleagues for whom taxpayer-funded luxury was regarded as an entitlement is reinforcement of just how highly our ministers thought of themselves and how low their ethical standards had fallen. No wonder they felt uncomfortable about telling John O'Donoghue the jig was up.

But the inability of the Fianna Fáil leadership to look out, to lift its head above petty point-scoring and admit culpability, pledging a massive reform plan that will wipe out what have become known elsewhere in the public sector as ‘legacy issues' adds to a destructive cynicism towards politics. And it comes at a time when we need hope in its ability to lift this country back to prosperity.

The truth about John O'Donoghue is simple. He was a greedy man who used the various high offices in which he was privileged to serve to finance a lifestyle for himself and his wife Kate Ann that he could never have afforded himself.

And the truth about the Dáil is simple. It too is a very greedy place.

The red-faced indignation of TDs and senators who insist they work hard for every cent they make and can verify the need for every cent of expenditure they stump up to selflessly serve their constituents is genuinely felt. But it is a display of self-delusion by the body politic that is so deep-seated it is reaching the point of corruption.

We use that word carefully and advisedly. TDs have for the past dozen years enjoyed a regime of self-written rules and regulations which, in any other sphere, would be regarded as a blueprint for white-collar crime.

What workplace in what universe, for example, allows an employee to travel to work by train and then passes a law to make it perfectly legal to claim, tax free, for every mile never driven? What employee would be paid for phone calls never made? For mobile phones never bought? What employer would dream up accommodation allowances so generous it would be hard to find a hotel that charges enough to justify the payment?

The list goes on and on and the public is rightly angry about the level of unvouched expenses that have become a second salary to many – though not all – TDs and senators.

But, as much as the minister for finance tries to spin the truth by pretending he has been fighting a rearguard action to introduce expenses reform, it should be remembered that John O'Donoghue's political demise has not been caused by the unvouched allowances set by the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission.

It was his verifiable, vouched expenses that have got him into trouble because of their excess. Every flight taken, every suite luxuriated in, every meal digested, every drink savoured, every limousine he comfortably relaxed in was receipted, even down to the £1 donation to Unicef.