Bono’s either making hits or taking hits ...

OH, to have been a fly on the wall in Finnegan’s bar.

Last Tuesday, the hostelry in south county Dublin was the location of a lunch for Michelle Obama and her two daughters. Chief among the hosts was Bono, up there once more, representing d’oul country.

Bono was accompanied by his wife and two sons. What the respective first families of the USA and Irish music discussed is of little interest. What would have riveted my fly on the wall was the discussion between Bono and Neil Young, in the same venue last Sunday. Reportedly, the two men shared pints in the aftermath of Young’s concert in the RDS on Saturday evening.

The gig was a thing of awe for anybody who finds it awesome that a 67-year-old musician can perform with the heart, energy, and raw passion of a 23-year-old. Young did just that, playing through the high winds, poor sound quality, and indifference of a large swathe of the audience.

Many people were there to see Young bring them back to their own, flowery youth, through renditions of his tuneful ballads and acoustic classics.

But, unlike his audience, Young was interested in the present rather than the past, and, accompanied by his band, Crazy Horse, he is burning out rather than fading away. In this regard, the man is peerless, and that’s apart, at all, from his talent.

Like all major celebrities who visit Dublin these days, old Neil paid a courtesy call on Bono, the Pope of Dalkey village.

Both men are known for their strong opinions. Young once said he had to rein in his impulse to talk publicly about issues, because he could sound like “a jerk”. Bono once said: “Even I’m sick of Bono.”

Both have strayed from their respective natural tribes. Young, an old hippie, bigged-up Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, though Reagan was the attacker-in-chief of the hippie dream. Bono has broken bread with George W Bush and Vladamir Putin to further his Africa agenda, prompting his sidekick, The Edge, to wonder how he could consort with those people.

Bono and Neil might have whiled away afternoon pints last Sunday, musing on the fickleness of their followers. Young’s concert divided opinion, but, throughout his career, he has shown scant regard for others’ opinion of his work. Bono has been getting it in the neck lately — over his tax affairs; over his crusade to lift Africa out of poverty; over, it seems, everything.

A book entitled The Frontman: Bono (In The Name Of Power), penned by journalist, Harry Browne, has lambasted him for everything, bar the shooting of Michael Collins. Bono, the book suggests, is interested primarily in cultivating an image for himself; hoarding his money; and accumulating powerful friends. According to Browne, Bono has spent the last 30-odd years “amplifying elite discourses, advocating ineffective solutions, patronising the poor, and kissing the arses of the rich and powerful”.

Holy Moses, what happened to three chords and the truth?

A theme of the book that deserves further exploration is that Bono’s crusade on Africa is either wrongheaded or cynical, and plays into the agenda of powerful, western interests who wish to exploit Africa for economic advantage. That is an issue that is discussed widely among those interested in the developing world.

The prominent left-wing commentator, George Monbiot, got in his attack in The Guardian, under the headline ‘Bono Can’t Help Africans By Stealing Their Voice’. Again, the U2 singer was lambasted for his approach to the African continent.

But is that fair? Or is it that Bono is expected to change the world?

Since first becoming involved in Africa, Bono has assiduously used his celebrity as a weapon to, as he sees it, further the agenda of eliminating hunger and poverty. He may have the wrong end of the stick, but does anybody really believe that his heart isn’t in the right place?

It’s reasonable to assume that, in the short-term at least, his work has made a serious impact on the frontline of pestilence.

Those who lambast him believe Africa would have been better off if he wasn’t involved at all. That attitude is difficult to fathom. Then, there are his tax issues. A few months ago, Joan Burton cited U2 as a prime example of people who don’t pay their fair share. The band moved the base of its publishing company to Holland in 2006, when the artists’ tax exemption here was radically altered.

The move came a few months after Bono met with then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, to push for Ireland to meet a target of donating 0.7% of GDP to development aid.

It sure ain’t rock ’n’ roll, but U2 is no longer a band, it’s a big corporation. And what corporation doesn’t minimise its tax liabilities?

Others got in on the act last week, with Clare Daly describing Bono, in the Dáil, as “Mr Tax Exile Himself”. That’s a bit harsh. Unlike others, he didn’t relocate himself offshore.

Neither did he, as one businessman did a few years back, arrange for his wife to live abroad for 12 months to save tens of millions in tax. Is the man with the mouth just a handy scapegoat for politicians who want to grandstand about laws they themselves implement and police?

It would have been preferable for somebody of Bono’s status to remain fully tax-liable in this country. He could then bestride the globe from the high moral ground. Now, he can be accused of possessing a neck like a jockey’s nether regions, asking Ahern to cough up more, while he fails to pay his fair share.

Instead, we learn that he has feet of clay. But does that single business decision define his public persona, not to mind the essence of the man? Does it negate all that he has done — wisely or otherwise — for Africa, or even what he has done for this country, as an ambassador at large?

There were plenty of times over the last few decades when I’d had enough of Bono; enough of seeing him flit like an annoying gnat across TV screens or the printed page. I also wrote, critically, about his tax affairs, but he hardly deserves to be hoist as the prime example of all that is wrong with this country’s power structures, or those of the international community, in tacking poverty.

Like many who ascend to the upper echelons of global entertainment, politics or business, Bono is an interesting ‘bunch of guys’. Those who know him claim that he retains the human qualities and friendships that he possessed when he started out, and that is an achievement in itself.

He’s no Neil Young, burning the days through middle-age, and beyond, with the spirit of his younger self.

Then again, Mr Young is ‘just’ a musician. Bono has evolved into something more than that. The public firmament would certainly be duller without him bestriding it, albeit, at times, like that annoying gnat. Long may he run, flaws and all.