Ahead of turning 60-years-old this Sunday, Bono spoke with Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ Radio this morning. Mr Hewson was in a reflective, non-poncey mood and genuinely came off as one of the best of us.
One of the outstanding displays of Irish philanthropy during this crisis came when U2 contributed €10 million of PPE to Irish frontline medical workers. But the beauty of this gift wasn't just in a cash donation. It was an exercise of clout. Bono was instrumental in personally sourcing that PPE, and made phoencalls to the prime minster of South Korea and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple in the process.
This morning, Bono explained how it all came together:
I got a call from Paschal Donohoe the Finance Minister, just talking about how I could contribute. And I thought, well, probably the best thing is figuring out how this PPE procurement would work out,
And the band are a little funny about public philanthropy because in the end, it’s part self-promotion. So we’ve just, we’ve always been wary of it, we’re not very American in that sense. But we wanted to do something serious and show solidarity with the frontline medics, but not just the carers but everybody who’s out there.
“It’s like the Raiders of the Lost PPE out there, it’s a really extraordinary market out there. And people are getting just pushed out of the way and countries are being pushed out of the way by all manner of vendors. And I just thought, well, this is what we can do,”
It’s really difficult and so I managed to with the help of Liam Casey and the band to get, when it’s finished, it will be about I think it’s about 20 million masks. They’re called the 2R masks were what the HSE were looking for and Paul Reid was incredible on this. And I think we’ll have 300,000 masks, goggles. We’ve 30,000 gowns coming, it’s a small contribution in truth.
Bono went on to praise the selfless work that Ireland's medical workers have done over the last two months.
I think when we surface from this the world is gonna have changed. And I hope one of the things that will have changed about it is, you know, that our view of who are the most important people in our workforce. And it’s not even just those nurses, doctors and care workers, it’s the taxi drivers who go in there, it’s the people stacking the shelves. I mean, it’s turned things kind of upside down. And I am grateful for that, I think everything is going to be new. And we need to think differently.
