Bono and the Wolf
Annual article: Injustice was as rampant in 2005 as ever before, to no-one’s surprise.
Eamonn McCann, 20 Dec 2005
In January, Oksana Sukanova had both legs amputated after suffering frostbite sleeping in shop doorways in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, over Xmas/New Year.
One of the ambulance team said: “It was as if her feet had been dipped in acid.” Sacked from her meat factory job, Oksana lost her tied accommodation as a result, and immigration law stopped her seeking other work. The BBC reported that the 27-year-old Ukrainian “showed typical Russian stoicism”. Inquiries showed she’d been treated legally, no worse than immigrant workers generally. “There isn’t a scandal here,” concluded a spokesman for the local council, scandalously.
In February, Derry bishop Seamus Hegarty was rumbled by the BBC surreptitiously imposing a £200,000 levy on the laity to pay the diocesan sex abuse bill. The case behind the story concerned a priest who had paid a large sum to a man who claimed he’d been sexually abused during counselling for problems rooted in previous, childhood experience of sexual abuse.
The bishop, aware of the priest’s history, had sanctioned his appointment as a sex abuse counsellor. The mind still boggles. The bishop still hasn’t resigned.
Outrage emanated even from world bankers at Bush’s appointment to the World Bank presidency of Paul Wolfowitz – key architect of the Iraq war, and of the “reconstruction” strategy of handing the country over to US multinationals. Wolfowitz bid to soften his image by announcing he’d had a Patrick’s Day chin-wag with Bono. CNN quotes “a colleague” of the singer’s: “Bono thought it was important that he put forward the issues that are critical to the World Bank, like debt cancellation, aid effectiveness and a real focus on poverty reduction.” Long-time U2 admirer Derrick O’Keefe told Counterpunch that “egomania and naivety” had prompted Bono to believe he could coax a corporate gangster into humanitarianism. The excessively cynical reckoned that rich and powerful Bono just wanted to keep the world shaped to serve the interests of the rich and powerful.
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