Garth Brooks is back. And he has snubbed Dublin. It’s a win for the Real People of Ireland
The Irish Times · Patrick Freyne ·
Brooks will return next year to Cork, Belfast, Kilkenny, Limerick, Galway – all the low places where he has friends – but not Dublin
Oh happy day! Today we, the Real People of Ireland, the people who eat dinner in the middle of the day and use the term “lads” in an ungendered fashion, have won a great victory against the people of Dublin with their deconstructed spice bags and their Stoneybatter trad music and their smug children weaned on mapo tofu and San Pellegrino. For Garth Brooks is returning and he has snubbed the capital.
The urbanites don’t want to mention the great shames of our past – the Civil War, for example, which, as readers will know, took place in 2014 and was a struggle between those who wanted to welcome cowboy crooner Garth Brooks to Croke Park and the elites of Summerhill who didn’t want him bespoiling their air with his tuneful burp of a voice and his tamed violins and his gated drum sounds carrying with it the general ambience of Buckfast drunk in the forecourt of a rural petrol station. And so Ireland dissed Garth Brooks. It was biblical, a blot on the national conscience.
The Dubliners won a victory that day but we the people of the outlands have long memories and no yen for forgiveness. Yes, Brooks was back in 2022 but he decided to play – the correspondent wrinkles his face in disgust – Dublin. He did so for 400,000 people, not one of them from the city. Like the Grapes of Wrath it was, with the hordes of twang-hungry rural folk descending on the metropolis.
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