Usually when someone of note passes away - a politician, a writer, an industrialist - it is customary to revisit the social importance of the deceased's work in the form of tribute or obituary, writes John Waters.
We witnessed this in recent times following the deaths of John McGahern and Tony Ryan. Last week, however, although one of the most central cultural figures in the Ireland of the past half-century had died, all we heard was that he was a great entertainer.
Joe Dolan was an entertainer in the same sense that Bob Dylan is a singer/songwriter. It is remarkable that we long ago managed to see past these superficialities in the international arena, but have yet to do so in the home context.
Everything said and written about Joe Dolan in the past few days - about his remarkable singing voice, his string of hits in Ireland and abroad, his immense talent for communication with audiences - is important as the detail of something bigger. But this bigger reality is left unstated: that Dolan was one of a handful of key figures in a social movement that transformed Ireland while setting out with more modest ambitions. Other key figures include Dickie Rock, Larry Cunningham, Albert Reynolds, Brendan Bowyer, Fran O'Toole, Big Tom and the Freshmen's duo of frontmen, Derek Dean and Billy Brown. When you scan that list you perhaps begin to understand the nature of the blockage that prevents the full story being told.
Several of these figures, being irredeemably unhip or politically coloured, do not lend themselves to celebration as revolutionary figures. But revolutionary figures they were.
Showbands were unique to Ireland, and for this reason have attracted disdain from the cultural commissars who would have venerated them had there been a direct parallel in some culturally-approved foreign territory. As a consequence of this provincialism, showbands and dancehalls are in popular cultural memory analogous to the Civil War in our political neurology. Though patently central to the social and cultural story, they have fallen foul of a self-induced amnesia, rendered unmentionable by virtue of being deemed incompatible with modern aspirations. This makes for bad history and confused identity.
Among his many contributions, Joe Dolan exploded the idea that being Irish meant you were disqualified from external recognition, communicating that in order to succeed abroad you had only to be excellent and work hard. Who, therefore, can quantify the significance of his pioneering international success in the emerging psyches of U2 and others? In this and a host of other contexts, to attempt a genealogy of the latter-day generation of Irish pop superstars without acknowledging the showbands is like discussing Irish politics without mentioning de Valera. It can be done but it sounds mad.
When I was growing up, Irish pop culture was showband culture and little else. The Drifters, the Miami, the Royal and the Freshmen provided a Big Bang in a society oblivious of its own cultural debilitation. When we talk about the GAA, the Late Late Show, The Irish Times, the Sunday Worldor the Progressive Democrats, we have no difficulty in underlining - and often exaggerating - the social significance of each of these phenomena at a certain moment. But we retreat from this mode of analysis when it comes to perhaps the most significant social phenomenon of them all.
The showband/dancehall explosion of the 1960s and 1970s was the most radical and effective force in the breaking of the conservative monolith of post-Famine Irish Catholicism, which, by losing touch with human reality had reduced religion to a form of policing. Showbands were about music and entertainment in much the same way that Bewley's was about coffee. Fundamentally they were about sex, about meeting, romancing and mating, and about extending to the first Irish pop generation the kind of freedom purveyed in the international arena by Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles.
The 7/6 or 50 pence you paid to be admitted to the ballroom was not simply a tariff on the entertainment, or even a levy on floorspace, but an instalment on a licence to have a love life without attracting more than cursory notice. It was a nominal tax on freedom and one we gladly paid. (Part of the blame for our poor sense of history must be placed on the unctuously disingenuous nature of most of the chronicles of this era by those who were there. If you want to know what was really going on, read Derek Dean's recent book, The Freshmen Unzipped.) Far more than Gay Byrne or Nell McCafferty or David Norris or Mary Robinson, men like Joe Dolan revolutionised Irish attitudes to, in a word, sex.
Joe, like Brendan and Tom and Dickie, was a High Priest of the emerging culture of freedom, ordained with the power to dissolve inhibition and temporarily rescind the law of prohibition so as to enable what we now think of as freedom to take its first faltering steps.
Joe Dolan can be called a liberator in a sense that is only in the faintest degree ironic. May perpetual light shine upon him.