CHRISTY MOORE: “At The Point Live” (Sony)

IT’S LIKE a geography of Ireland, this album, both physically and culturally. From Dingle to Kildare, from Poulaphouca to Boolea, from Tipperary to Knock. From drink to the Church, from emigrants to Travellers, from unmarried mothers to lovers, to soccer fans, to supporters of the G.A.A. Yes, all forms of life and living are here. So much that touches us is touched on.

Of course, this is why Christy Moore is so popular. He’s as guaranteed Irish as you will ever get. You listen and you hear yourself. There’s the bitter and the sweet. There’s the banter, and the way the Church is ridiculed down the aisles. Mother Teresa is on the pill and Casey is on the tear, with his Firestone tyres putting the shits up Kerry sheepdogs.

Laughter is everywhere, the wit is ripe. We hear grown men howling and Christy telling us that they’re in heat up the front. Enthusiastic clappers get short shift, as he chastises them that it’s not shaggin’ Dire Straits they have. And here surely we see a unique power – to give out to an audience and get them to laugh at themselves as you’re giving out to them. This indeed is a command few performers have today.

This album is a cabaret, as ‘Welcome To The Cabaret’ proclaims. People are out for a good night and feck Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show. And they get one. But what they also get is a journey into the changing soul of modern Ireland. The Church gets massacred time and time again. It’s all done with humour but the intent is fairly clear, and the funniest thing is that people laugh as much at lines like: “We had the Blessed Virgin here/Father Horan did declare/And Foster and Allen/Appeared just over there,” as they do at stories of skullin’ drink and never-again hangovers.

You wonder if any of the messages get through. Like, most of Christy’s audience will be at Sunday mass. And although there’s a good cheer for ‘Go, Move, Shift’, I wonder how many would be cheering if a set of caravans moved in next door to them.

The North is very much in the background, hinted at here and there, although the old war is not entirely forgotten. The biggest cheer of the night comes during ‘Joxer Goes To Stuttgart’, when Christy sings, “With their Union Jacks all them English fans for victory they were set/Until Ray Houghton got the ball and he stuck it in the net.” You’d wonder, in 1994, what that cheer really means. Still, whatever anything means or doesn’t mean anymore, the fact is that Christy Moore continues to have the bravery to confront as well as entertain.

One guitar, one voice and an audience. Because as Christy knows well, the performer is a weak article without them. As he says himself in the liner notes: “Wherever people congregate and surrender their ears to a performing artist something unique occurs . . . Yourselves and myself sparking off each other, it keeps me going – Thank You.” Thanks yourself, Christy.

• Gerry McGovern