How Ireland went from a land of ‘police and priests’ to a tax haven to Cool Hibernia
Anybody under the illusion that Ireland is a sort of paradise for wealthy tax exiles might want to think about Leslie Charteris. The writer of The Saint, the hugely popular Roger Moore TV series, he moved here in the 1970s to avoid paying a fortune to HM Revenue & Customs but had a thoroughly miserable time among the burghers of south Dublin. Why on earth, he asked, would anyone live in Ireland if they didn’t have to.
It was a sentiment shared by the Police’s guitarist Andy Summers, who found himself evading the British taxman in west Cork. Having enjoyed the bright lights for years, the unspoilt countryside of his new home was of little consolation. He was bored out of his mind and told anyone who would listen.
The experience of both men is reflected in a new book from the prolific music and culture writer Damian Corless. Yet the majority of the tax exiles who made Ireland their home had a much happier experience.
For the actor Robert Shaw, famous for roles in From Russia with Love and Jaws, life in Toormakeady, Co Mayo, was blissful. It was, he claimed, “the nearest point on earth to heaven”.
Sting had a much cheerier time here — holed up in Roundstone, Connemara — than his Police bandmate.
And Ronnie Wood made rural Co Kildare his home for many years — it was, seemingly, the perfect refuge from the madness of being on the road as a member of the Rolling Stones.
Corless is especially by those who came to Dublin and threw themselves into the life of a then decaying city, not least Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, who still lives there to this day.
There are interviews, new and old, most entertainingly with Status Quo’s Francis Rossi. The pony-tailed rocker may have got one over Blighty’s taxman, but those savings were blown on cocaine. He did find love here, though, and fathered a daughter. And the Quo recorded a pair of albums in Dublin’s Windmill Lane, helping to put the studio on the global map. Far, far better albums would soon be made there.
Many of the British stars who holed up here in the 1980s, such as Spandau Ballet and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, would spend the early hours in the Pink Elephant nightclub, one of the few celebrity hangouts in Dublin that decade. Frankie frontman Holly Johnson was much happier in Borris, Co Carlow, and used to delight in receiving knitted goods from elderly local ladies.
There’s an interview with Robbie Fox, the swashbuckling impresario behind the Pink Elephant — and entertaining as his recollections are, it’s hard not to scoff at his assertion that it was Ireland’s answer to New York’s legendary Studio 54.
A book solely about pop star tax exiles in Ireland would be of limited interest and, happily, Corless casts his net wide. At its best, it takes a look at the cultural life of Ireland from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.
It was a time of profound change, most of it for the better. In the space of a decade and a half, the country went from a place of “police and priests”, to borrow a line from the Boomtown Rats’ furious Banana Republic, to the Cool Hibernia where old ideas, such as a ban on divorce, were being booted out.
Much of that change, Corless contends, was driven by great music, comedy, activism and more. And Charles Haughey certainly played a part — his tax amnesty helped support home-grown musicians and writers, not just big names from across the Irish Sea.
There’s a fine chapter on the development of Father Ted — Corless had a ringside seat, having been a Hot Press colleague of its creators Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan — and an enjoyable look-back at how Jack Charlton’s embrace of the so-called Granny Rule helped Irish football burn brightly, if briefly.
He looks anew at showbands and finds room for discussion about one impresario from that era who made a killing in the rave years of the early 1990s. Louis Walsh also gets a look-in.
A chapter on censorship will make the modern reader’s blood boil and there’s detail that will be new to many, including the revelation that Alex Comfort’s early 1970s bestseller, The Joy of Sex, was re-banned in 1986. The past really is a foreign country.
Corless is a fine writer and a gifted storyteller so even when he is tackles subjects that have been dealt with in multiple books — such as the 1979 papal visit — you still want to read on. I thought I’d read everything worth knowing about John Paul II’s whirlwind three-day jaunt around Ireland, but Corless’s description of irreverent, reggae-soundtracked parties in the trees that fringed the open-air mass at the Phoenix Park made me titter.
There are several very funny anecdotes and a number of passages had me laughing out loud. One concerns Foster and Allen, the easygoing midlands peddlers of inoffensive country ’n’ Irish who, in the mid-1980s, found themselves in the line of fire because they had played apartheid-riven South Africa.
Corless quotes the Fianna Fáil senator Donie Cassidy, who used to manage the duo. “We did a survey,” Cassidy declared, “and found that 15pc of Foster and Allen’s audience are deaf.”
Whimsical, informative and hugely enjoyable, Tax, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll is a superb snapshot of an Ireland in flux.
Music: Tax, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll by Damian Corless
Mirror Books, 288 pages, paperback €21.75; e-book £6.99
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