Gallagher Legacy Strengthens Irish Connection during Oasis Tour

Emigration tore the heart out of Charlestown: generations of young people took the boat to England and left behind derelict homes and shuttered shops, a hollowing chronicled in a landmark 1968 book, The Death of an Irish Town.

Some returned to this corner of County Mayo for summer holidays – with children who were growing up with English accents and city ways – before vanishing back across the Irish Sea and leaving Charlestown to its decay.

For those who stayed, this melancholy history may be a reason to look back in anger, but this week at least brings a measure of consolation – and pride – in the form of Oasis.

Liam and Noel Gallagher will perform in Dublin this weekend and in the process are expected to remind Ireland, and global fans, that they are part of the Irish diaspora and that Charlestown is akin to a spiritual home.

“We’re very, very proud of our association with the boys,” said John Casey, a renowned Gaelic footballer and resident who has befriended the Gallagher brothers. “They were frequent visitors here before and after fame found its way with them.”

The musicians were born in and grew up in Manchester but their mother, Peggy, used to drag them “by the ear” to spend summer holidays with her relatives in Mayo, Noel recalled in a 1996 RTÉ interview. “We had never seen the likes of nettles, fields and stacks of hay and all that, so she was determined to give us a bit of Irish culture, and it was a bit of a culture shock but we grew to love it and we still do.”

According to lore, the young visitors assured sceptical locals that one day they would be famous. After becoming emblems of Cool Britannia in the mid-1990s they continued to visit their grandmother Margaret Sweeney, until she died in 2000, to socialise in pubs and, in the case of Liam, go for runs and hikes, including up Croagh Patrick, a Catholic pilgrimage site. “It was cloudy, we couldn’t see much, but he loved it,” said Casey, who accompanied the singer up the peak.

When either brother entered a pub, word sometimes spread and drew busloads of fans from around the area, said Casey. “It was my first experience of craziness. But mostly we tried to let them be, to not let them be bugged or bothered.”

Charlestown mourned when Oasis broke up in 2009 and it celebrated last year’s announcement of a reunion tour, which moves to Dublin’s Croke Park stadium this Saturday and Sunday. “There were a lot of relieved human beings around here when we heard they were rekindling things,” Casey said.

Over the years the Gallaghers were photographed in pubs, and somebody uploaded a video of Liam joining a traditional music session at his local, JJ Finan’s, but what won over the locals was a low-key normality at odds with the brothers’ hell-raising image in England.

“There was no guitar-smashing and they always made time to chat to staff,” said Donal Healy, a marketing manager for Ireland West airport, also known as Knock, just outside Charlestown.

Healy’s journalist uncle John Healy wrote the book The Death of an Irish Town, also known as No One Shouted Stop!, that chronicled his native town’s calamitous decline. That decline was part of a wider phenomenon across rural Ireland, but the local and national population has rebounded since the economy took off in the mid-1990s.

The title paraphrases an interviewee in the book who said that no part of Irish society stood up to say that mass emigration was not inevitable.

The poverty of the 1960s that drove a teenage Peggy Sweeney to seek work in Manchester – where she married another Irish emigrant, Tommy Gallagher – is no more, said Donal Healy. “For Charlestown it’s nearly come full circle, the fact that we have this connection with the family. We’re in the news for the right reason.”

Excitement is growing as the concerts approach. Radio stations fill their airwaves with Oasis songs and speculation about whether the brothers will make a surprise visit to the town. A football team sang Oasis hits in the town square and a cafe put “Oasis soup” on the menu with the tagline “you get a roll with it” – a reference to their 1995 hit.

“People are coming to the town just because of the connection,” said Karena Finn, who showed a photograph of Liam with his son during a visit to her family’s pub, Johnny’s Bar, several years ago.

A customer named Anne, an emigrant back in Ireland on holiday, lauded the Gallaghers for nourishing their ties to Ireland. “For all the faults they might have,” she said, “they never forgot their roots.”