FIVE YEARS AGO, Christy Dignam and Aslan were getting ready to take the stage in Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens.
The band was in the process of rehearsing for a two-night slate of shows to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough album Feel No Shame. Dignam had been diagnosed with an incurable cancer five years prior and had taken a break from gigging to recover.
The Journal reporter Cormac Fitzgerald joined Dignam at Camelot Studios in Blanchardstown days before the gigs for a wide-ranging interview that took encompassed everything from the state of the country to the state of modern music.
Dignam was a fierce critic of how the Irish state approached various social issues, including many he’d had first-hand experience of – such as addiction and homelessness (the singer has previously spoken about being homeless for six months).
“I’ve a thing about the whole addiction thing,” Dignam told The Journal in 2018.
“If we put a quarter of the money into treating addiction that we put into fighting addiction and putting people in prisons and stuff like that…
“If we put a quarter of that money into treating addiction we wouldn’t need to be filling our prisons with people that aren’t criminals, that just have some sort of… They have a mental illness, you know? Treat it as such.”
“For example, Leo Varadkar came out a while ago talking about people on welfare… bleeding the country dry,” he said referring to the controversial Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All campaign, launched by then-Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar in 2017.
“This country is not bankrupt cos some bloke is claiming a hundred euros or two hundred euro a week.
“This country is bankrupt cos the bankers fucking bankrupted us. But they won’t say that, so what they do is they blame this girl who’s claiming unmarried mothers when she’s really living with her fella, they blame her and our attention goes to her.”
Varadkar was Taoiseach at the time Dignam gave the interview, and has since resumed the post after a sojourn as Tánaiste between 2020 and 2022.
“We’re all fighting among ourselves down here while the bankers are still up here making millions,” Dignam said.
“We’ve 4,000 kids living on the street and in hotel accommodation. It’s outrageous.”
Dignam’s assessment of the situation remains relevant as five years later, the Department of Housing say that 3,594 children are currently homeless in Ireland.
“We always remained an Irish band, a true Irish band,” he said.
“Because if you look at U2 or somebody like that, they’re an international band at this stage. They kind of belong to the world, they don’t belong to Ireland anymore.
“Where we still belong to Ireland, you know? I think that might be what it is.”
“We’ve done GAA clubs in every corner of the country, you know?
'We just knock each other all the time. If you see someone trying to do something, why not encourage it?'
— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) June 14, 2023
Speaking in 2018, Christy Dignam gave The Journal an insight into the meaning behind Aslan's hit This Is https://t.co/BIl8Bp0WyL pic.twitter.com/9OlpV3hcb3
“And every little village and every little town all over the country. And I think people appreciate the fact that you’ll go down Ballaghaderreen, or Ballybunion or wherever – Connemara or Donegal.
“Because you go to these little towns people appreciate it. So then when we’re doing gigs like the Iveagh Gardens people come up to those gigs, because I think they appreciate the fact that you’ve come down to their small town.”
In 2013, Dignam was diagnosed with amyloidosis, an incurable blood cancer, resulting in years of treatment. At the time, Dignam reflected upon how the diagnosis changed his life and his career as a performer.
“There’s nothing is going to focus you more than a terminal illness,” said Dignam.
“Because of the illness and the nature of it I was in hospital for a year and then I was in a wheelchair for a year when I came out of the hospital,” he said.
“So for a two-year period we didn’t do anything at all and I started getting really depressed. Because for me, gigging gets all the demons out of me, it kind of exorcises all the fucking badness that’s in me.
“And it was only when we started gigging again that I started to feel kind of normal again.”
To the end, Dignam remained in love with gigging, saying: “I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the 22 hours if it wasn’t for that two-hour period that you’re onstage where it’s just you and the audience.”
“There’s so much crap going around at the moment,” Dignam said at the time.
“We’re kind of doing it now for the same reason that we started to do it years ago.
“When we started to do it years ago it was because there was so much crap, we were listening to all this crap and saying ‘we can do it better than that, let’s get a band together’, and now it’s gone so crap.”
“When you come from a place like Finglas you think that success and things like that happen to other people. You never think it’s going to happen to you, you know? It was amazing buzz and it was something that we weren’t expecting.
“I think we’ve always tried to be honest in what we did, musically and in every aspect of the band and I think people like that.”
Five years into terminal illness, Dignam remained bullish about the future, telling The Journal: “We’re not solicitors that do this in our spare time, we’re musicians, we’re a band – that’s what we do.”
“So to me I can’t see any other way of going, this is what I do, this is what I’ve dedicated my life to. So I’ll keep doing it until I don’t think it’s cool to be doing it anymore.”
Dignam passed away yesterday at the age of 63, surrounded by his family.
Video by Andrew Roberts.
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