The only thing more annoying than Bono’s hypocrisy – and he *is* a hypocrite – is the annoying tendency for successful Irish people (and their apologists) to dismiss any and all criticism of them as plain old Irish begrudgery (especially when the person in question is a talentless illusionist like Ronan Keating).

Bono attracts criticism not because we Irish are a nation of begrudgers (and I don’t deny that we are, to a certain extent) but because he maintains such a high public profile and is so vocal about his pet issue, Third-world debt. It’s difficult to listen to the self-appointed spokesman for the right-on (from whom, exactly, does Bono get his mandate?) banging on about poverty in the developing world when his band – one of the most successful ever – has just collected royalties on yet another dull as ditch-water collection of mediocre songs. This is the same band that has signed lucrative deals to promote the Apple iPod and whose stage show costs a million bajillion euros to put on. And he’s banging on to World leaders, men and women who have to try to meet the impossible expectations of people like me that my standard of living will be maintained and that I’ll be able to drive my 10-litre hedgehog-crusher to the shops and back for the forseeable future, about giving money to charidee and wiping out debt? What a twat!

It reminds me of a line in a Primal Scream song – a line that nearly made me throw my copy of Evil Heat in the bin: a life of work is a life of crime\you pay your taxes, you do your time. That’s easy for you to say Bobbie, you eat 100-dollar bills on toast and snort ground diamonds off Kate Moss’s thighs.

But don’t listen to me, I’m just a begrudger.

Next week: a critique of Louis Walsh, the most successful hobbit in Irish music.

OK, so I’m back from Dubai. We’d a great time although to be honest we didn’t do much apart from eat, sleep and shop. So, we could have stayed at home really. The heat and humidity made it very difficult do do much outdoors other than lounge around by the pool or on the beach so most of the plans we’d made for desert excursions and what-not went out the window.

That said, we did see enough of Dubai to get some kind of impression of the place and it’s a weird one. Obviously most of my preconceptions didn’t hold up: most of the local people we met and spoke to were very nice and hardly any of the taxi drivers brought us out to the desert to behead us. Then again, most of the people we met and spoke to weren’t actually from Dubai or even Arabs; the majority of people working in the service and tourism sector seem to be from the Far East – Pakistan, India, Thailand, China and so on, with a handful of Westerners thrown in.

When you’re walking around the malls though, you do come across a lot of Arab shoppers and it’s hard to reconcile the traditional garb – thobe and keffiyeh for the men and full hijab for the women – with the mobile phones, designer sunglasses, handbags, shoes and exotic lingerie that they were variously carrying or perusing. I know that Dubai and the UAE in general is the most westernised of the Arab nations but it is kind of ironic that the largest shopping mall outside of the United States of America should be in an Islamic nation, where Western notions of consumerism and materialism are apparently anathema.

But I guess that’s just another of my preconceptions blown.