Comment: Liam Fay

Taking their lead from Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s 1985 famine relief fund-raiser, the geniuses behind Self Aid predicted that, by creating a feelgood mood and harnessing commercial goodwill, they would slash the lengthy dole queues in a day.

Opposition to the venture was fierce. Critics pointed out that state agencies were spending millions every year trying, and failing, to create employment, so a happy-clappy singalong was unlikely to have much success.

Undeterred, the organisers unveiled a stellar line-up including U2, Van Morrison, Christy Moore and Geldof’s Boomtown Rats. Moral support was provided by politicians and bigwigs from industry and the semi-states.

Inevitably, the event was a fiasco. The 1,332 jobs “created” by the day’s end disappeared overnight. It soon emerged that this figure included jobs at McDonald’s, Irish Life and the ESB, all of which were already in the pipeline. Other companies, we learnt, had pledged nonexistent jobs merely to plug their products on television.

Self Aid’s most passionate apologist was U2’s Bono.

It would be interesting, therefore, to hear his reflections about the enterprise 20 years on, particularly as he embarks on a more ambitious but no less naive collaboration with big business through the launch of Red — an upmarket brand to be used by firms such as American Express and Giorgio Armani to sell a range of products from which 1% of profits will go to fighting Aids in Africa.

There is little that seems to embarrass the religious intelligentsia more than, well, religion. Viewing themselves as serious-minded folk, theologians like to convey the impression that their beliefs are grounded in reason and philosophy rather than the simple faith (aka superstition) of ordinary believers.

Take Fr James Good, emeritus professor of theology at University College, Cork and a hero of liberal academic Catholicism. Last week, Fr Good denounced the increasing interest among Catholics in what he called the “barbaric” and “childish” ritual of exorcism. Priests who practised the casting out of so-called demons were, he argued, indulging in “medieval fantasies”. Consequently, exorcism belongs in the dustbin of history, along with other manifestations of religious irrationality such as limbo and churching — the “purifying” by clerics of women after childbirth.

Fr Good is clearly a stickler for rationality, an odd trait in a priestly theologian who is professionally obliged to advocate belief in the literal existence of angels, saints, Satan and indeed a Supreme Being. Unfortunately, the good father has, thus far, declined to explain why Catholics should reject one brand of medieval fantasy yet embrace dozens of others.

Times change, elitism doesn’t

The barbarians are at the gates . . . of Stephen’s Green. This seems to be the subtext of the twaddle we heard last week about the purported descent of Grafton Street into a vulgar bazaar.

Leading the protest was Frank McDonald of The Irish Times, who deplored the replacement of the thoroughfare’s fine-art emporiums by chain stores and fast-food outlets. His lament was echoed by Senator David Norris, who recalled the days when Grafton Street was a promenade for ladies in white gloves.

Both men are undoubtedly sincere in their concern about the district’s changing aesthetic values. But their dewy-eyed nostalgia provides a convenient rhetorical alibi for the old-money elitists who have never liked the fact that Dublin also belongs to hoi polloi, those for whom convenience shopping is not a sign of cultural collapse.

Ultimately, it isn’t the decor of the buildings that such snobs abhor so much as the absence of decorum of those who now frequent them.

Gay is okay but size still matters to our tabloids

There was something blackly comic about the efforts of our scandal-sheet editors to find a public interest defence for their shock-horror treatment of the “news” that Malcolm Byrne, a Fianna Fail councillor for Gorey, Co Wexford, attempted to find a date by using a gay website.

As would-be cheerleaders for the tolerant new Ireland, the tabloids couldn’t be seen to make a federal issue out of the politician’s sexual orientation. Consequently, to justify their hysterical shrieks about Byrne’s “web shame”, they had to search for a more civic-minded angle.

This they duly found in the claim that, in his lonely hearts ad, Byrne had boasted that he is, shall we say, something of a stallion in terms of both proportion and performance.

Though it was presented as a sex scandal, therefore, the story was actually another weary complaint about dubious political promises.

Sean McEniff made international headlines with his threat to sue the publishers of the Lonely Planet Guide, the latest Irish edition of which described his native Bundoran as one of the country’s “tackiest” resorts. Quick to issue writs, McEniff the hotelier, councillor and chairman of North West Tourism, has also threatened Met Eireann with legal action for erroneously forecasting a blizzard in the area.

Following McEniff’s latest outburst, Lonely Planet’s review of Bundoran as “a kitsch assortment of half-baked fairground rides, flashing arcades, fast-food diners and overpriced B&Bs” reached a wider global audience than might have been expected. Workers in the local tourist industry must be furious. Maybe they should sue.