Garth Brooks is back. And he has snubbed Dublin. It’s a win for the Real People of Ireland

Oh happy day! Today we, the Real People of Ireland, the people who eat dinner in the middle of the day and use the term “lads” in an ungendered fashion, have won a great victory against the people of Dublin with their deconstructed spice bags and their Stoneybatter trad music and their smug children weaned on mapo tofu and San Pellegrino. For Garth Brooks is returning and he has snubbed the capital.

The urbanites don’t want to mention the great shames of our past – the Civil War, for example, which, as readers will know, took place in 2014 and was a struggle between those who wanted to welcome cowboy crooner Garth Brooks to Croke Park and the elites of Summerhill who didn’t want him bespoiling their air with his tuneful burp of a voice and his tamed violins and his gated drum sounds carrying with it the general ambience of Buckfast drunk in the forecourt of a rural petrol station. And so Ireland dissed Garth Brooks. It was biblical, a blot on the national conscience.

The Dubliners won a victory that day but we the people of the outlands have long memories and no yen for forgiveness. Yes, Brooks was back in 2022 but he decided to play – the correspondent wrinkles his face in disgust – Dublin. He did so for 400,000 people, not one of them from the city. Like the Grapes of Wrath it was, with the hordes of twang-hungry rural folk descending on the metropolis.

Brooks has read the room since then and he has just announced that he’s back for 10 dates in May and June of next year all across the country – Cork, Belfast, Kilkenny, Limerick, Galway – all the low places in which he has friends. But not Dublin. Here in The Irish Times my colleagues are already weeping into their keep cups. “No! No! No!” They cry. “I don’t understand it! Why is he back? Why do they like him? Why don’t they have similar love for opera or Fontaines DC or CMAT? Why Garth Brooks?”

As an undercover culchie, here to slip unreconstructed samizdat into the paper, I chuckle happily to myself. Country music, like mother issues and amorphous guilt, is the lifeblood of this nation. For the twang at which Brooks excels first left Ireland in the 18th century and went up into the American mountains where it melded with rural music from other places in Europe and Africa. And when it came back here again in the 1940s and 1950s we recognised it, and welcomed it home and added accordions and a rigid backbeat for dancing to and the names of few obscure townlands. Country music felt like looking in a mirror and, most importantly, it didn’t act better than us (we were feeling pretty sensitive at the time, being only a young nation).

And now we have arrived at the point when our nation comes of age, the moment when the country ’n’ western counties (everywhere except Dublin and parts of Wicklow) secede completely, leaving the capital to sink into stagnation as Greater Donnybrook and the rest of the country to thrive to the sound of a lap-steel guitar and the machinations of the local pharmaceutical plant. And right across the island in celebration of this, patriots get to their feet, put their hands on their hearts, and tearfully sing the national anthem: “Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots ... ”

Tickets for Garth Brooks’ Irish Tour 2027 – Belfast, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick and Cork – go on sale on Thursday, November 12th, at 8am from Ticketmaster.ie