Another Bono recording? Surely Ireland has suffered enough

There are many ways to admire Bono. There are also, unfortunately, many ways to find him absolutely insufferable.

Take the sainted moment when he hoisted the arms of John Hume   and David Trimble aloft like a spiritual referee declaring a draw in the heavyweight bout of history. It was meant to symbolise reconciliation. Instead, it looked suspiciously like a man inserting himself into the final frame of a photograph he did not personally develop. Hume and Trimble did the grinding, unglamorous, politically suicidal work of peace. Bono did the stadium lighting. There’s a difference. Yet somehow the image calcified into cultural memory as though the Good Friday Agreement had been brokered backstage between encores.

Then there’s the music. Yes, yes, global anthems, soaring choruses, stadium transcendence. But here’s a simple pub test: can you whistle one? Not hum vaguely. Not chant the hook after three pints. Whistle it cleanly, recognisably, without sounding like a kettle boiling. Try it. “With or Without You.” “One.” Go on. It’s all atmosphere and earnestness, crescendos and echo — emotionally freighted, melodically elusive. The songs don’t so much lodge in your ear as loom over it. For a band so monumentally successful, there’s something oddly un-whistleable about the catalogue. The soundtrack of a generation, apparently, but not of a casual stroll.

And then, of course, the wealth. Bono the tireless campaigner against global poverty, jetting between summits to lecture billionaires about moral obligation — while being one himself. The optics are dizzying. Few people begrudge success, and fewer still would deny that he has leveraged fame for causes beyond album sales. But there is something faintly operatic about lamenting inequality from the balcony of immense fortune. When sermons about redistribution are delivered by someone whose own portfolio could fund a small republic, the cognitive dissonance hums louder than any guitar riff.

None of this erases the philanthropy, the activism, the decades of influence. But it does explain the eye-rolling. Bono doesn’t just occupy the stage; he occupies every moral horizon within a five-mile radius. And sometimes — just sometimes — people would like the spotlight to rest somewhere else.