Line Dancing – the phenomenen that terrified the GAA…

Light man people woman

Keith Duggan in today’s Irish Times discusses Garth Brooks’ return to Croke Park. Much like the statue in Ballinspittle a few years earlier, the sight of Garth Brooks storming the world brought out the evangelists. His music – this cannot be stressed enough – was inescapable. How you felt about the Brooks catalogue of twangy ballads and anthems was immaterial. Even Ireland’s hardcore metal purists of the early 1990s subconsciously came to know every single line of the Brooks staple …

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#GarthBrooks: GAA needs to get better at being good neighbours.

So what have we learned from the Garth Brooks debacle? The most screamingly obvious thing is that with 400,000 people buying tickets, country and western is the thing for a significant proportion of the Irish people. And the other is that this cancellation is going to hurt a lot of people and a lot of ‘indigenous business’. Of course even within that most popular of genres no one else is likely to fill Croke Park for five nights in a …

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