June 5th
I never made it to Castlebar. Hell, for that matter, with all the time at Barcuba I hardly made it to my bed before 4 a.m. The earliest bus for Castlebar would have left around six hours later (as if I’d even try to make that), and since the next wasn’t until 2, I decided not to bother. I could have gone and stayed over for today, to come back in time for the Moby concert, but looking in my List again, it looked like the majority of events for the Blues Festival finished yesterday.
This all turned out for the best, though, as on Sunday afternoon my friend Jacinta showed up at my door, an unannounced and brilliant surprise that had me smiling as soon as I buzzed her into the building. She’d been in Co. Clare for the weekend, visiting relatives, and to try to put off for a little longer the inevitable return to Dublin she thought she’d stop into Galway for a day and a night.
After lunch today, we wandered towards Eyre Square, so Jacinta could get a timetable from the bus station. “I don’t want to get back too late,” she said. “My flat’s in a nice part of town, but I don’t want to have to catch a late bus there.”
We wound up listening to speakers at another demonstration, similar to the one I went to on May Day. The theme for this demonstration, sponsored as before by the Anti-Nazi League, centered around the treatment of refugees in Ireland, as well as the portrayal of refugees in the media. Now, in the words of Dennis Miller, “I don’t mean to go on a rant here,” but dammit, I’m going to.
Going by the numbers the demonstration speakers quoted, about 12,000 refugees are living in Ireland right now. I don’t know how accurate that figure is, or if the tally conflicts from source to source, but whether the real figure is 12,000, 24,000 or 6,000, it won’t overwhelm Ireland’s 3.5 million population. If you picked up Ireland and shook it, the country would rattle – not surprising, considering the millions who over the past two centuries died in the famines, or who emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. and Australia.
In 1929, for example, while in the west of Ireland a Connemara man talking about his home told travel writer H.V. Morton “their land is bad, they are poor, the young people have their minds on America – the real capital of Connemara is New York…. Hundreds of the white cabins you see are kept on dollars. The sons and daughters in America send home money every week, or when they can.”
Now the sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters, of those Irish emigrants wish to turn away refugees in need – yet where would many of these Irish be (if they were here at all) had those “sons and daughters” been turned out of the U.S., or turned out of Australia?
Talking about it to Jacinta, she told me that recently, somewhere in Tipperary, a village had pressed for the turning away of refugees who were to be relocated there. “I can’t really imagine wanting to go to Tipperary, though,” Jacinta said.
“Yet anywhere in Ireland is probably better than where they came from,” I replied.
People aren’t prone to whimsically uprooting their families – not disrupting, but amputating their lives – by migrating to another country, on another continent, to crash land in another culture. This isn’t whimsy, and people who are willing to cross continents and oceans are no more lazy or useless, or less human, than the same Irish to crossed over to New York or Sydney. If refugees are coming to Ireland, it’s because they feel they need somewhere to go, need somewhere for their children to go, need somewhere that they feel might give them a better shot at a better life.
The Irish are in no position to sympathize with this. They can only empathize – because the time isn’t too far-gone when the Irish were seeking that chance for a better life, somewhere other than where they were born.
Perhaps – I hope – the Irish are just having trouble adjusting to the influx of refugees. After all, Ireland is used to people emigrating from it, not immigrating to it. Whatever the cause of this resistance to the acceptance of refugees, though, I hope that attitudes will change, from the government and the media on down, and that the Irish give more of these people the same chance that the Irish were seeking not too long ago.
But I didn’t mean to go on a rant.
Much of this was said after the concert, at the pub; as with all other attitudes and interests, leave it to a couple of pints to fire up the political blood of a usually non-political man. Between the demonstrations and the discussions, though, there was Moby.
And he kicked ass.
And the Man Played On
As my friends and I left for the blue-top, we all wondered the same thing: could Moby, despite the name of his new album, actually play? Sure, he played most of the instruments, did much of his own mixing and vocals and such, but there’s a hell of a lot of difference between cutting an album in your bedroom, and jamming it out live, on-stage.
Under the big blue tent, the crowd – many of whom, including me and my friends, were all swigging pints of Heineken for the sake of forgetting that we had paid IR£5.50 for two pints of the stuff – was probably wondering this too, on some level. We all can think of bands and artists who are great to listen to, but suck live.
Moby isn’t one of them, though. Personally, I thought he put on a damn good show, with vibrant songs arranged to give us lots to dance to, for a long time, and slower numbers interspersed throughout to give you a chance to catch your breath, rest your dancin’ feet, nip off to the loo, or waste more money on Heineken.
If anything held back the show, it was the crowd, and my flatmate, Clare, has said as much. Perhaps it’s just Galway; I don’t know, but a certain Heineken-proof restraint – part stoicism, part ponciness, I wonder – seemed to keep a lot of people from moving. At FLC I saw for the first time the Men Who Do Not Move, and not even a Moby/Heineken combo was potent enough to uncross their arms, de-glare their faces and unglue their feet.
All the same, lack of abandon didn’t result in a reason to abandon hope of a good show. I was too busy flopping about myself to properly observe, but it still seemed that plenty of people were dancing away, especially during a high-powered “Honey” that was so strong that, finally, even some of the Men Who Do Not Move had to change their names.
In the end, Moby’s about as good live as he is in the bedroom. The man himself had all the energy of his music; jumping around on stage, switching between instruments and microphones. I tried to see if power wires were hooked up to him, as an explanation for where all the music’s explosive power was coming from, but in the end, all I can say is play on.
