I Did Not Know That

Ireland apparently hates U2:

That was certainly the takeaway from an infamous 2017 Guardian piece, written by Dean Van Nguyen, who journeyed to Dublin to figure out why the Irish hate U2. “If another country produced the biggest guitar band in the world — let alone one with a population of just 4.8 million — you’d expect airports to be named after them,” he wrote. “But walk around the musicians’ home city of Dublin and you’ll barely see an image of Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. There’s no major mural solely dedicated to the group. You might, though, catch some graffiti scrawled on concrete walls and darkened doorways, opining in classically Irish slang that, ‘Bono is a Pox.’” Van Nguyen went to a Dublin pub to ask patrons about the band, with few having kind things to say. (“We don’t like them because they did well,” said one person. “They’re not the Dubliners, the Pogues, even the Cranberries — they all weren’t that big. But U2 did very well.”) Of course, the belief that they were tax cheats was part of the equation, but to Van Nguyen’s mind, “[T]he nation’s dislike of U2 is classic Irish begrudgery — the phenomenon that Irish people are predisposed to feel envy and resentment towards those who achieve a certain level of success.”