If we were going by raw percentage, I really should be called Irish Steel. I’m 7/8ths one kind of celt or another including no small amount, of all things, Cornish. Hell, my paternal grandfather came within a hair’s breadth of taking holy orders with the Jesuits. Is that Irish enough for you?
I was running errands around town yesterday and heard a radio station in Peoria say they would spend St Patrick’s Day playing World’s Greatest Irish Band. So I want to urge you, as you drink your Guinness or green beer and sup your corned beef and cabbage, to spend no time listening to that penny licking gombeen Paul Hewson and his sanctimonious, crypto-Christian rock.
In 2015, he said U2 “paid a fortune in tax”. An earlier decision by the band to run some of their business through the Netherlands was, he said, “just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed. And that’s just one of our companies, by the way. There’s loads of companies”.
To ifreann with him. Celebrate instead Turlough O’Carolan, the blind Irish harper often called the Irish Mozart. Here is the equally astonishing Davey Graham’s arrangement of a couple of his tunes.
Slainte!