Ireland has a strange, almost Lynchian relationship with country music. There are the Daniel O’Donnell/Nathan Carter/Garth Brooks die-hards, of course. This cohort is usually composed of people who grew up on westerns of the ’60s and ’70s, and came of age to the bizarre strings of the “Country and Irish” genre of music proliferated by the showband era. But interestingly there’s also a large chunk of millennials who were impacted (quite tragically) by Garth Brooks’ sold-out Croke Park concerts in the ’90s, and subsequently found themselves in some strange time-warp where youth clubs were teaching line dancing and the price…
