Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof spoke to Dave Fanning this morning on RTÉ Radio One, ahead of his performance with the Boomtown Rats at Electric Picnic this weekend.

After discussing music, the conversation turned towards refugees.

Dave Fanning: “Back in the Eighties, obviously everybody knows you saw [BBC’s] Michael Buerk on the television, you realised something had to be done, you jumped out of your seat and said, ‘we gotta do something’ and you did Band Aid, Live Aid, and the history is all there. And I’m reading from the headlines in just this morning’s paper, I got two here, the Irish Independent, a drowned toddler, ‘the harrowing symbol of a migrant crisis’ and The Guardian, ‘the shocking cruel reality of Europe’s refugee crisis’. Like I mean in terms of just, do you just look upon that as a dad or look upon that as maybe something you could do or something you’ve done before that you can do again or what way do you see it?”

Bob Geldof: “I look at it with profound shame and a monstrous betrayal of who we are and what we wish to be. That’s how I look at it. We are in the moment, currently now, a moment that will be discussed and impacted upon in 300 years time, a fundamental shift in the way the world has worked for the last say 600 years. Power has been sucked out of the West and moved East; technology, once it met money, was multiplied by human greed, collapsed the world economy. If there’s a new economy there needs to be a new politics, there isn’t and it’s a failure of that new politics that led to this fucking…sorry…this disgrace, this absolute sickening disgrace. And late last night, you know, I couldn’t get my head around this so, at about 12.30am I started banging out this piece and I said, ‘ok, let’s take on now, let’s put our money where our mouth is’, so I am prepared. I’m lucky, I’ve got a place in Kent, I’ve got a flat in London. Me and Jan would be prepared to take three families immediately in our place in Kent and a family in our flat in London immediately and put them up until such time that they can get going and they can get a perch on the future. I cannot stand what’s happening. I can’t stand what it does to us. I’ve known and you’ve known and everyone listening knows the bollix we talk about our values are complete nonsense. You know, once it comes home to roost you know, we deny those values, betray ourselves but those values are correct and it happens time and time and time again. So we are better than this, we genuinely are I don’t want to drag you back to the [Boomtown] Rats but, you know, that night on the Late Late where Bono and Gavin Friday were looking at the show and went, ‘what’s this’ and you know Joe O’Connor and various others were going, ‘yes, yes’. You know the point about Ireland at that point, I say to Gay Byrne, is that I always viewed Ireland as a sort of deep-diving whale that every Friday night it was allowed to come up and vent for two hours and then go back down again, get pushed back down again and in those two hours you saw an elegance, an intellectualism, a humanity, a maturity, that wasn’t allowed by the powers-that-be then and eventually of course it made itself known and felt. The same is true now. You know I do understand, of course I understand, the economics and the politics, ‘ah yeah but if we let some more in, we’ll…’ All right. All right. I do understand when [British Prime Minister David] Cameron says the root cause of this must be addressed. Yes it must but we are in a period of fundamental shift.”

“Twelve years ago, I was in Lampadusa, the island where first, you know the people were arriving from North Africa and I was with the Mayor and we went to a refugee camp because he told me every morning he woke up to the sight of men, women and children dead on the rocks around Lampadusa. So I started talking about this. Of course the Daily Mail, you know, were scathing and derogatory and saying, ‘Geldof, you know, doesn’t know what he’s talking about’.

They rang the mayor of Lampadusa and he denied he ever met me but it was happening then because when people are poor, they move. I am an economic migrant, Britain accepted me and let me got on with it. I couldn’t do it in Ireland which made me very bitter about Ireland but made me eternally grateful to the British people for saying, ‘Get on with it, dude’. And I did. The same thing is true of thousands of Irish, millions, in America, Australia, Britain, everywhere else, this is happening again except it’s people fleeing war not famine and economic hardship, that will increase as the environment decays. The environment makes people move from one area of a resource to another. It’s happening and has happened all over Africa. For 40 years, Dave, 30 years I’ve been dealing with refugees. Last year I was in the board of Somalia and Ethiopia like with the refugees from the Somalian war – all of this is happening now. We must have the politics and the humanity to deal with it. It makes me sick and a concert won’t do it.”

Listen back in full here.

Boomtown Rats at Electric Picnic