And Now

I’ve never felt it hard to be Irish - Geldof

After waiting almost an hour for Bob Geldof in a trendy members club, his PR pokes her head around the corner and reassures me for the third time that “he won’t be long now“.

“He is with a Finnish television crew and Bob loves to talk y’know,” she smiles.

I know an audience with the great man is a rarity so I resign myself to another cup of tea and wait for my summons.

When it does arrive I’m lead into a library-like room. Geldof is pacing like a caged animal. His handshake is strong, warm and sincere. Within moments he adopts a defensive sitting position. Screwed up like a foetus he bends over his knees like he is wracked in pain. He looks surprisingly youthful for his 50 years.

He cocks his head in my direction. “What was all that census business about then,” he asks me, lighting the first of many cigars.

“This bloody tick the Irish box,” he says in his familiar Dublin 4 drawl.

“I got this phone call from Ted Barrington (former Irish Ambassador to Britain) one day,” he tells me, both aghast and disgusted. “he wanted me to back this campaign to find out how many Irish are in this country. I said: ‘What? Surely that’s divisive, what we should be looking at are things that are inclusive.’ I wanted nothing to do with it.”

Bob is obviously pissed off. Did you tick the Irish box, Bob I enquire, tongue firmly -in-cheek? “Yeah, of course I did,” he scoffs. “And I don’t understand this being born in Britain and being Irish thing either,” he says in the next breath.

“One of my friends is a director and grew up in Birmingham of Irish stock. He claims he never met another English person until he was 11 years old and I couldn’t get over it. My kids were brought up in England and they are English and that’s that.”

Bob Geldof is not one to mince his words.

He is filled with passion and anger in equal measure. But he is intelligent and articulate also. His greatest passion, however, is music.

His latest album, Sex, Age, Death, takes swipes at both his ex-wife the late Paula Yates and her lover — Aussie rocker Michael Hutchence, who killed himself a year before Yates. The album is raw with emotion but it has been universally acclaimed by the critics.

“I can’t listen to it y’know,” he says, “because for me it works exactly right. It perfectly evokes memories of what I’m writing about to the extent that it makes me feel sad.”

“The last album was called The Happy Club and this album is fixated on death. F***, y’know?” he says. “But I view the future with a certain trepidation now. No matter what way you read it my life has been extreme and I don’t understand why it is so episodic. As a result it is very tiring but I will not flinch from it. I don’t have a f***ing choice,” he cries.

“Somebody else seems to be writing the scenes of the next episode of this living soap opera which happens to be my life. If you walk down the street in people’s heads is Boomtown Bob, Band Aid Bob, Businessman Bob, Big Breakfast Bob, Paula and Bob, Sir Bob, Saint Bob, this f***ing Bob that f***ing Bob, why?”

There are no easy answers to how hard life can be — and they certainly don’t lie with God in Bob’s opinion.

“I’m not namedropping but I had a row with Mother Theresa a couple of times about this sort of thing,” he says. “She saw the suffering of Christ in the horrible things we were looking at. And I said: ‘Look I’m not religious but to me this is a denial of God, y’know. This is a human problem, it should not exist. People dying of want in a world of surplus is an intellectual absurdity and a moral disgrace — that’s a denial of God and a failure of ourselves and civilisation that that should happen. So if God is around Mother, he’s pissed off’!”

The mind boggles when you imagine Geldof haranguing a latter day saint. Well, what did she say to that, I ask wide-eyed?

“Well she wasn’t the greatest theologian,” he says as he thoughtfully relights a cigar. “She was just a good person. She wouldn’t have it y’know? But she found her own way of living and reasons for doing what she did.”

I ask him about Afghanistan. Expecting him to condemn the bombings again he confounds my preconceived opinions of him. He wholeheartedly supports the war.

“War is the great failure of civilisation. It’s for when all else fails. But I don’t think they have any choice at all,” he says, “ 7,000 people died in a matter of hours — a grotesque attack by people who know no moral limits. We are in serious danger from these people that reject our values —they hate us. They loathe us. And by ‘us’ I mean those that hold freedom of speech and the values that we have as a result of enlightenment. They hate them and they view them as profoundly evil.”

So, the IRA will not be on his Christmas list either. The more he speaks of the group the more his voice raises and the more vexed he becomes.

“As we know being Irish, the terror war is shameful, murderous and criminal. Those people represent no one. A moron can kill people. It was only by engaging in the political process did they get anywhere. Then the bullet became redundant and an impediment to further progress.

“The terror war was a grotesque failure. Grotesque in as much as 3,000 people died for what they would have got anyway. It doesn’t work.”

Is he concerned for his own safety? “F*** my own safety. You can’t let any twat like this stop you functioning. That would be a grotesque personal defeat. Some people are boring me about getting out of London. I mean, ‘grow up’!”

Geldof’s anger and passion has certainly not waned over the years. He has many bugbears — one of which memorably is Third World Debt, which he campaigns about with Bono from U2.

“Being a Paddy I can talk and generally we can articulate things pretty well — emotions and ideas and I think I can do that,” he says matter-of-factly.

Another sore point is the Celtic Tiger — he feels the real Celtic Tiger owes its success to the thousands of emigrants who came to Britain in the ’50s who sent back millions of pounds worth of remittances.

“The real Celtic Tigers were those tough brave souls who came here in the ‘50s and who sent back every year the equivalent of the annual health budget to Ireland. They have largely been abandoned and that is truly shameful. You see them wandering about lost here. It is absolutely our responsibility as the Irish in Britain who wouldn’t have made it without these people to take care of them. They really are heroes. There is no question of it. Brave f***ing normal people that did whatever was necessary for people back home and in so doing got lost.”

What can we do for them? “Find them, tell them how great they were. Show them our appreciation by bringing them back into the fold and take care of them as they took care of us.”

Geldof, however, says he luckily never encountered anti-Irish racism in Britain.

“I’ve never felt it hard to be Irish,” he says. “There is so much between the Brits and the Irish — we are the same f***ing coin. There isn’t an Irish person or an English person who doesn’t have a drop of each others’ blood and I bet you any DNA test will tell you that .

“What other country would accept such a huge influx of another culture waving their flags and saying we are another culture and we shall remain so, stay here, take the jobs and send the money home and just take them in. When the boot is on the other foot what do they do? They reject it all. The racism now in Dublin is profound and disturbing...”

He has mixed views about Ireland’s recent economic boom. He believes the development of the country has been “fantastic to watch” but warns against becoming smug. “If you really want to involve yourself in an Irish conversation, just stand in the middle of the room and say: ‘Those property prices are maaaaaad!’”

Of all the honours Geldof has received, the one he is most proud of is the mantle — the best Mum in Britain, his “greatest compliment”. Even though, he says, he is sure he is doing everything wrong with his children.

“I’m sure they’ll grow up and say I was dreadful and I’m quite strict,” he says. “I’m doing lots wrong I’m absolutely sure but what can you do? It’s a cliché but the most you can hope for is that they are happy.”

For now Geldof will remain a permanent resident of Britain and has no plans to move. He says he faces the future with trepidation because of the events of the past few years. As I pack up my things I have to ask one question to ask him. Is it true you were thinking of going for the Irish presidency in 1997?

Our very own Mother Theresa smiles, crosses his arms across his chest and announces emphatically: “Nope, no way.”

Irish Post

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