THE Wolfe Tones’ final night Féile concert sold out within a few short hours of going on sale this week.
The group has long been popular in West Belfast and indeed in countless other republican areas of the country. But their enduring popularity – particularly among young people – is something to behold, given that the most recent phase of the conflict ended over quarter of a century ago, before most of those who will be singing along with them were born.
Their undoubted and lasting popularity as political entertainers stands on its own, of course, but adding to it is a certain understandable defiance among their fans over the targeting of the group and its audience by the largely unionist media here. It’s an entirely cynical and obvious tactic. The discredited and exhausted single-narrative conflict story that these media outlets flog every day of the week is carried on in their insistence that they have the moral right to police and pontificate.
Let’s not forget that the same organisations which throw up their hands in horror every time the words ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ are heard in the Falls Park have just spent a week doing bonfire picture specials – essentially celebrations of illegal, unregulated, unpoliced, dangerous and even deadly events; and they have treated their public to Twelfth specials, as if an organisation which forbids its membership to enter Catholic churches is somehow something to be proud of.
So there’s not a single person looking forward to the Wolfe Tones in the park who is taken in by this performative guff. But there’s a large cohort which is well-disposed towards Féile but which is discomfited by the post-concert fall-out. And they should be heeded too. We know exactly what’s going to happen on Monday morning if the Wolfe Tones again sing ‘that’ song because we’ve seen it so many times before. Another orgy of ‘Ooh, ah, up the Ra’ pearl-clutching will begin, gathering pace as the week goes on and morphing from mock outrage about the words of a song into generalised attacks on Féile itself and escalating to attempts to damage West Belfast’s most towering cultural achievement by going after funders and sponsors.
This newspaper and this community knows all about censorship – direct and indirect. We defend the right of our community to remember and commemorate and celebrate in the way we see fit. But sometimes in order to take two steps forward it is necessary to take one step back. While we have every right to send a defiant message to those that demonised and targeted this community for decades, we also have a duty to protect and shine the Féile diamond we have cut.
The cold truth is that, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, on the final day of Féile one line in one song does considerable PR damage to all that has gone before. The Wolfe Tones cannot be told what their set is, no more than any other musical artists can. But surely it’s a conversation worth having with the band in the three weeks before the concert.
