NOT since JR Ewing was shot in 1980 has a man in a Stetson hat proved such a talking point in this country.
But despite global coverage of the Garth Brooks Croker fiasco, I expect the international media are ready to move on from a story that has dominated the headlines here for the past number of weeks (seems longer somehow, doesn’t it?).
In true Irish style, no party to this sorry mess came out in a particularly good light in the aftermath of the shock announcement last week. As the blame game got underway, we had politicians, the GAA, Dublin City Council, the promoter, local residents and, darn it, even the great country crooner himself, taking their share of the flak.
Notwithstanding the High Court injunction threat, which has since been withdrawn, at least three sold-out gigs could have gone ahead had Brooks not thrown a strop and taken his ball back.
Frankly, his “five or none at all” ultimatum was a crass display of brinkmanship that won him little sympathy. Similarly, comparing which concerts to play as being like having to choose between children was mawkish sentimentality at its worst. It’s hardly ‘Sophie’s Choice’, Garth.
As I write, Brooks has just rejected the latest compromise proposal which would allow him to play his five precious shows, with two matinee performances.
Incredibly, the Taoiseach himself has intervened in this matter of national importance and there was even crazy talk of asking Obama to get involved (that was the lowest point in the whole saga for me).
By the time you read this, the shows will either have been salvaged or we will be still reading about the latest proposal to convince the world’s favourite cowboy to grace us with his presence. Who knows, we may have been invaded by US forces the way things are going!
Regardless of how this plays out, should we be collectively embarrassed as a nation, as has been widely suggested? Well, yes and no.
In my view, Dublin City Council management made the right decision in the first place to only allow three concerts. A balance needed to be struck between satisfying the residents’ legitimate concerns and facilitating the majority of ticket holders.
A number of politicians did themselves a disservice by issuing populist statements to the media calling for a solution to the standoff, while naturally being cognisant of the local residents’ grievances. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what Dublin City Council’s ruling sought to achieve in the first place?
We should rightly be embarrassed by a system that allows 400,000 tickets to go on sale for concerts that have yet to receive a licence. This is a particularly Irish way of doing business and will no doubt force a belated review of our licensing laws. The army of loyal Garth Brooks fans who bought tickets were caught in the crossfire and it was hard not to feel sorry for them.
Much has been made of the reputational damage caused to Ireland by the controversy. Residents were urged to support the five concerts in the national interest, with dire warnings that e50 million would be lost to the local economy if they didn’t go ahead.
I certainly had a degree of sympathy for genuinely struggling hotel and pub businesses affected by the cancellation of the concerts. I was also impressed at how some hotels immediately offered full refunds to their customers owing to the exceptional circumstances involved.
But let’s cast our minds back to January when the tickets first went on sale and a number of Dublin hotels immediately hiked up their rates to cash in on the Garth Brooks bonanza. This type of behaviour smacks of greedy opportunism and lays bare the rip-off culture alive and well in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
And for that, we should be genuinely embarrassed.