In 2006, Irish newspapers reported that U2 had moved part of their music publishing business to the Netherlands.
The reason was straightforward. The Irish government had capped a long-standing tax exemption for artists, which meant that U2's royalty income would now face a significantly higher tax burden in Ireland. The Netherlands offered a near-zero tax rate on music publishing royalties. U2 used that structure. The move was entirely legal.
The reaction in Ireland was sharp.
"How can someone call for greater contributions to the world's poor while making exhaustive efforts to reduce their own contributions to the Irish exchequer?" This was the essential criticism — voiced by Irish politicians, development organizations, and newspaper columnists.
💰 The Tax Criticism — "That Is Not an Intellectually Rigorous Position"
Bono's response to the controversy came in stages.
The first substantial account appeared in The Irish Times in 2009. "We pay millions and millions of dollars in tax," he said. "The thing that stung us was the accusation of hypocrisy for my work as an activist."
Then, in a lengthy interview with The Observer's Tim Adams, the question was asked directly: "Was it not hypocrisy for you to try to hold the Irish government to account for its spending while going through fairly exhaustive efforts to avoid paying into the Irish exchequer yourself?"
Bono's answer was long and contested. "It is not an intellectually rigorous position unless you understand that at the heart of the Irish economy has always been the philosophy of tax competitiveness. Tax competitiveness has taken our country out of poverty. On the cranky left that is very annoying, I can see that. But tax competitiveness is why Ireland has stayed afloat."
Critics did not accept this framing. The vast majority of Irish citizens face substantial tax burdens and have no access to the kind of international planning available to the very wealthy. The contrast between what Bono demanded of governments and what he contributed himself remained uncomfortable, and the argument that he was simply following Irish government policy satisfied almost nobody in Ireland.
In 2017, the Paradise Papers again placed Bono's name in reporting on offshore investment structures. The cycle of criticism renewed.
One thing remains true through all of it: when Bono speaks about African poverty, the emotion is real. The six weeks in an Ethiopian desert in 1985 exist in a completely separate register from tax strategy. Both things live inside the same person. The discomfort of that coexistence is something Bono himself has acknowledged, without ever fully resolving it.
🕶️ The Sunglasses — Glaucoma and the Armour
In 2014, on BBC One's The Graham Norton Show, the host teased Bono about his signature look. "You didn't always wear sunglasses, and then when you found them you were like, 'I love sunglasses.' Do you ever take them off?"
Bono's answer was unexpected.
"This is a good place to explain to people that I've had glaucoma for the last 20 years."
A beat of surprise in the room. He continued: "I have good treatments and I am going to be fine." And then, with characteristic self-deprecation: "Now you have this information, you're never going to be able to get it out of your head — you will be saying, 'Ah, poor old blind Bono.'"
To Rolling Stone, he said simply: "I have very sensitive eyes to light."
Glaucoma is a condition in which increased pressure within the eye damages the optic nerve, and one of its symptoms is photophobia — acute sensitivity to light. The specific type Bono is believed to have, uveitic glaucoma, is rare and can cause particularly pronounced light sensitivity.
The condition began more than twenty years before he spoke about it publicly. That timeline overlaps almost exactly with the period when Bono began wearing his trademark sunglasses — the early 1990s, the Zoo TV era, when The Fly character appeared in enormous dark lenses.
He once described the sunglasses as armour. In the Zoo TV context, that meant a fictional persona protecting the real one from the noise of celebrity. But simultaneously, those same glasses were a medical necessity. A rock star's image and a medical condition occupying the same object at the same time. That kind of layering — things being more than one thing at once — is characteristic of how Bono has moved through the world.
🎙️ "Am I a Hypocrite?" — The Value of Asking the Question
One of the things that makes Bono an interesting person to study is that he does not ignore the criticism.
He absorbed the tax controversy without stopping his advocacy work. He explained his glaucoma rather than cultivating the mystique. He accepted being called ridiculous for thinking a pop star could influence heads of state — and kept doing it.
In his 2022 memoir Surrender, Bono engages with his own contradictions more openly than in any previous public statement. "I feel a constant tension between being one of the most famous people in the world and loving anonymity," he wrote.
"I am perceived as extrovert. Inside I'm a completely different person." This goes beyond the division between stage and private life. It describes something more fundamental — the gap between the person who broadcasts to the world and the person who needs silence to survive.
He also wrote: "The most important things in my life have not changed in decades. My relationship with Ali. My family. My friends. Music. And what Cedarwood Road gave me."
That sentence, arriving after four decades of world stages and political negotiations and public controversies, is the most clarifying thing Bono has said about himself. The noise has been enormous. The thing underneath it has not changed.
🍀 Why He Still Goes Back to Ireland — The Memory of Cedarwood Road
As noted in Chapter 1, the 2014 album Songs of Innocence contains a song called "Cedarwood Road."
Bono was fifty-four years old when he recorded it. The song returns to the street where he grew up in north Dublin — running from it as a boy, and being unable to leave it behind as a man.
A man who addressed the World Economic Forum, shook hands with the Pope, negotiated AIDS policy with a US president, and walked the corridors of G8 summits goes back, in song after song, to a three-room house in north Dublin.
Observers have noted that Bono speaks most simply when he speaks about Ireland. On politics, poverty, the music business, religion — his language is often contested, complex, and sometimes self-contradictory. But on Ireland, on Dublin, on Cedarwood Road, something simplifies. "That place made me."
When Mandela died in 2013, Bono wrote a tribute for the Irish Times. In describing their time together on Robben Island, outside the cell where Mandela had spent eighteen years, Bono placed his own Irish memories alongside Mandela's South African ones. Imprisonment and poverty and discrimination take different forms, but they belong to the same family of injustice — that conviction, running underneath the tribute, is what connects them.
Bono was criticized for his Irish tax arrangements in the name of loyalty to Ireland. He expressed his loyalty a different way — in music, in songs about the street he came from, in a refusal to pretend that the boy from Cedarwood Road no longer exists inside the man on the world stage.
"Cedarwood Road" is the most personal form that expression has taken.
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Across these four chapters, the outline of a man has emerged.
Born between two religions. Motherless at fourteen. Led to a stage by a handwritten note on a school notice board. The man who refused violence in "Sunday Bloody Sunday," jumped off the stage at Live Aid to rescue a girl from the crush, turned a pope's attention into a front-page photograph, and stood in genuine humility before Nelson Mandela.
A man who wears sunglasses because of glaucoma, who took criticism for his tax arrangements, who asked himself whether he was a hypocrite — and kept singing.
Moving through contradictions was Bono's method.
"We are one but we're not the same. We get to carry each other." He has said this of humanity. It may be equally true of the different versions of himself that have coexisted across six decades.
Not perfect. Contradictory. But not stopping.
That is Bono. That is U2. That is the honest picture. 🍀
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SOME ALBUMS FIND YOU. THIS ONE WAITED FORTY YEARS.
There are records we hear, and records that hear us — that somehow know we aren't ready yet, and hold their secrets until we are.
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is that kind of record.
When I first encountered Stevie Wonder's sprawling 1979 double album, I was looking for the genius behind Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. What I found instead stopped me cold: something vast, unhurried, and deeply strange. Music that seemed less composed than grown. I didn't understand it. I put it away.
Forty years later, I came back — and what I heard shook me.
This book moves track by track through all twenty pieces, not as a musicologist, but as a listener who needed four decades to catch up. Part personal essay, part meditation, part love letter to a misunderstood masterpiece, it asks one question: what does it mean when a piece of art has to wait for you to grow into it?
If you've ever returned to something years later and found it transformed — or discovered that you were the one who had transformed — this book was written for you.
Available now on Kindle.
Free for Kindle Unlimited members.
The most profound music never rushes. Neither does the reader it's waiting for.
— Toshiro Mori
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