NICE 'N' SLEAZY

The biggest cheer at Féile ’94 was not for a band but for the Guinness advertisement. The most talked-about act in Irish music circles was Dustin. Zig And Zag’s MTV programme is now the cutting edge of contemporary rock television. The tragic death of Kurt Cobain ushered in the Suicide Generation. It was not a vintage year for rock music.

The major record companies continued to provide enormous entertainment, on the a-side campaigning vigorously against pirate records and tapes, and on the flip side justifying their artists appearing on pirate radio.

The row over the lack of support from RTE for Irish music eventually calmed down, but not before we heard some extraordinary claims by Cathal McCabe among others. Meanwhile we had to rely on foreign television stations to uncover one Irish scandal after another, causing many to wonder what exactly RTE does with their license fee apart from the Fanning Sessions, and following Dick Spring’s approach to alleviating the unemployment problem.

Musicians familiar with the five-finger exercise had just begun preparing for the long-finger exercise in relation to Minister Higgins’ long-promised music industry Task Force, but no sooner had it actually been set in train than the fall of the government derailed it. One can only hope that it, or some variant of it, will be introduced before it’s too late to do something substantial for the Irish music industry. But it was a real treat to have a Minister for the Arts who actually liked music and is a genuine enthusiast for art and culture.

We could at least be thankful that the killers in the North decided to give peace a chance, but down South the censor determined that we were not fit enough to watch Natural Born Killers in the cinema. Meanwhile innocent children throughout the country could, with no safeguards whatsoever, watch Taoiseach Albert Reynolds’ terminal Dáil performances on prime time television with more slime oozing out of him than was ever seen in the goriest Hammer Horror.

It has been said that a country gets the politicians it deserves, but do you personally feel you deserve the sleezeballs we have had to suffer in recent times? If you do, we’ll have some more along in a moment for you.

Irish parents continued to struggle to raise their kids to be honest, caring and decent citizens while trying to explain the scandalous sham and corrupt cover-up that was the beef tribunal, the Catholic Church’s disgraceful complicity in child sex abuse cases, repeated lies about extradition warrants, the passport fiddle, tax amnesties for political supporters, the suspicious speed of Harry Whelehan’s short-lived appointment and the ongoing sight of the greasy fingers of our senior politicians dipping into every available pie.

And then, as if they could not filch enough money out of the system, they voted themselves a salary increase of obscene proportions. It is a credit to the extraordinary tolerance of the ordinary Irish people that our leading politicians and bishops can still roam freely about the streets without having the shit kicked out of them at every opportunity. But maybe that’s something to look forward to for 1995?

Jackie Hayden