Gavan Reilly: What the Taylor Swift gigs teach us in our Elections Era

I can see the glee in the Editor’s eyes as he pulls open this column. Yes! Some material to do with Taylor Swift! Stick her name in the title of the article and the view counter on the website will tick upwards no matter what. Some teenagers might flick across this page, see their idol’s name in the article title, and pause for a moment before flicking on disappointedly when they realise this column isn’t actually about her at all. Sorry, kids.

There’s an understandable reflex from the media to latch onto whatever the Big Thing is at any moment. The Eras Tour is, well, an era-defining zeitgeist thing; a pop culture phenomenon that seems to shift the world on its axis: an all-consuming behemoth that doesn’t just occupy the minds of people going to the gigs. Everyone wants in: advertisers, hospitality… so it becomes The Thing everyone feels they have to talk about.

Except, if you think about it, it’s not really. Yes, there were clearly a lot of Swifties left without tickets this year – though if a casual browse of Instagram is anything to go by, there were also quite a few fans who saw her two or three times in Dublin, perhaps in circles of friends where different people managed to nab tickets for different nights. Maybe there was a market for more than 160,000 unique ticket holders. Who knows?

You’d be forgiven for thinking, though, that entire country had attended the shows. Excluding those who went more than once, a maximum of 2.2% of the island’s population went to a gig. Yet her visit seems to have occupied more than its fair share of the airwaves. One city radio station, playing in a barbershop on Monday afternoon, opened with a 15-minute chat between the hosts discussing their respective experiences of different shows. As someone with only passive interest in the whole thing myself, I wondered how isolating the whole media circus must seem to people who simply don’t buy into it.

I used to think the same about Electric Picnic. I get that it’s the country’s biggest music and arts festival, but as someone who’s only gone twice – and in both cases, as a ‘performer’ doing a live edition of a podcast – it always baffled me why the event garnered the level of deadpan news coverage. ‘People gather for recreational event’. Radio stations set up mobile studios so they can do live shows from the festival. Really? Has it struck them that maybe the people who’d be most interested in a live festival show, are already there?

All of this is a meandering reflection to conclude that it’s possible for the entire media ecosystem to convince itself of the relevance of certain things, which might actually not matter terribly much to the punter on the ground. That’s certainly true of the political class from time to time too – with its occasional obsession on ‘bubble stories’ that matter little to those beyond Dublin 2.

But as a general election comes into view sometime within eight months, one wonders if government parties will have the presence of mind to realise that those outside the bubble might have different perspectives to their own. ‘Keep The Recovery Going’ springs to mind. Will they have the foresight to avoid the same insular thinking?