"The music of REM slowly faded into the background and the audience looked towards the stage in suspended silence. The blue lights on the rigging dimmed, the sun weakened as the clouds overhead gathered and darkened and Dave Fanning ran out onto the stage, shouting,

"Now they’re back! They have conquered the world. Are you ready for the greatest rock and roll live show you will ever see".

An instant later, U2 walked onto the stage. I noticed how they appeared older, wiser, the perennial grin of youth now hardened by many months of travelling. Bono then caught the microphone and said.

 "Welcome back Bono, Larry, Adam, The Edge: U2!"

 "Well the Jacks are back and what an All Ireland we have for you tonight!"

I stood, blissfully numbed, aware that a great occasion was unfolding and listened as the chords of their first Island single, "11 O’Clock Tick Tock" opened the homecoming concert. After the song ended, Bono put his hands over the microphone, shut his eyes tightly and started to sing the lament ‘I Will Follow’. In that moment of solitude, I felt his pain, because I knew that the lyrics of the song had been partly inspired by the death of his mother.

The ‘Unforgettable Fire Tour’ had earned its name from an exhibition of images, which had been painted by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the band had seen in the Peace Museum in Chicago. This building was dedicated to the life of Martin Luther King and promoted a message of non-violence through the arts. The band had got the unpleasant images transferred to the Grapevine’s Arts Centre in Dublin, but in a quieter moment at the Pink Elephant nightclub, Bono had told me that the title of the tour actually referred to the spiritual fire that burns within people. The band dedicated their next song ‘MLK’, to the memory of the assassinated black Civil Rights leader. When the tribute ended, Bono faced the audience and in a memorable moment recalled an incident that had occurred on the streets of Derry thirteen years before,

"This is a song I wish we didn’t have to write, but we had to write it, and we want to play it"

 Then, as a silence gradually descended on the crowd, we looked within our own hearts, and listened to his words of pacifism. The words were made more poignant as we were standing on the same ground that British soldiers had calculatedly gunned down fourteen civilians at a Gaelic football match in 1920. On that first ‘Bloody Sunday’, a cold afternoon in November, the sparks of the fires of rebellion flickered in the collective psyche of the Irish nation. The events that followed were etched indelibly into the tortured text of our colonial history and now for the first time in all those years, the bright yellow flames mellowed back into the glowing embers of pragmatism and we cleansed our souls. Suddenly, almost from nowhere, Bono plucked an Irish tricolour from the audience and symbolically interweaved the chorus of ‘Give Peace a Chance’ into to the lyrics of the song ‘Electric Co Bad’. It did not go unnoticed to the medical students amongst us that the other words of the song referred to a patient who had once received Electro Convulsive Therapy at St. Brendan’s Hospital in Grangegorman. In a way, the contrasting lyrics symbolised the contradictions we were confronting, in our politics, in our religion and in our sexual freedom. The sun started to set and shadows were falling fast in the stadium as Bono took the microphone again and said,

"For those without jobs, without money, it’s an unfair city. Some are broken and beaten down by this-I sing this song for you,

There’s good and bad in every city, this is Bad!"

The uncritical song referred to a friend of his who had plotted his destiny in life through the desperate, desolate world of heroin addiction in Dublin. But amid the tragedies of the city, the band was also beginning to open our eyes to the other problems of the outside world. The next song "New Years Day’, recognised the Solidarity Movement and the arrest of their future President of Poland, Lech Walesa. This was 1985, the first time that a Communist regime had been challenged and the backdrop of time infused the track with a sense of unique camaraderie to the movement. Irish people were coming of age and making a statement about our place in the post war world.

It was hard to believe that within a few short years the band would be staying in East Berlin, in a house once occupied by Leonid Brezhnev making an album about the fall of the Berlin Wall. A small wind was getting up as Bono came back for the encore and said,

"Well they’re saying backstage this is the friendliest crowd they have ever seen in a place like this! Fifty seven thousand people-no problem!"

By the time U2 performed their last number ‘40’, dusk was already setting in and the crowd held up lighters to accompany the words of the song, which had been lifted the lyrics mostly from Psalm 40, ancient Israelite song of deliverance to be found in the Psalms of David.

Somewhere in that broad collective, as the stars appeared in the darkening sky on that late June evening, we knew the words were symbolic and it really was the youth of Ireland who were being delivered. We sang the song:

"About a year ago I was sitting in a coffee bar with a singer/songwriter that I’ve got to know. I was talking to him about a song that he had written. A song I said that when we play Dublin, I would like to play it for the people of Dublin. He said that he would be both proud and pleased that we should do this. His name was Bruce Springsteen, the song is My Hometown. This is for my father!"

How long? How long? How long?
How long must we sing this song?

and as it gained momentum we knew we had to sing the songs of desolation no longer. The world was changing and we were being liberated from the old hypocritical links with nationalism, with pastoralism, and even Catholicism and as we peeled off the protective skins of our forefathers, the stage turned dark for the last time and Larry finished the night with a symbolic crash of cymbals.

‘I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry, he brought me up out of the pit, out of the miry clay’

"One day Irish men will stop fighting each other over the past. They will live and work together in the present. This is not the future. Sunday Bloody Sunday!"