Lost in Showbiz is meant to be funny, but the context suggests that Sophie Heawood (G2, 3 April) was being serious in stating that “Bono’s family struggled under religious segregation in Ireland”. Paul Hewson grew up in Cedarwood Road, a non-segregated, tree-lined avenue of substantial semis in the Dublin suburb of Glasnevin. He went to a non-segregated, mainly Catholic, primary school, after which his parents chose, as was their right, to send him to a mainly Protestant secondary school, rather than to any of the mainly Catholic schools available to him in the area. The Protestant minority in the Irish Republic (around 4%) is not oppressed or disadvantaged, by law or otherwise, and has always been overrepresented in high-status jobs. Whatever might lie behind the ghastly music, tax-avoidance and preachy posturing, it wasn’t his struggle through the ghetto years.
Ciarán Ó Maoláin
Armagh
