Irish pop star CMAT has teased the next single on her forthcoming album Euro-Country, which includes a cut at former taoiseach Bertie Ahern over his time in government.
The upcoming album, expected to be CMAT’s most political record to date, comes after the singer received rave reviews for her standout performance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
In social posts on Tuesday, CMAT shared a short clip of the single, which shares the same name as the album, along with a snippet of the lyrics:
“All the big boys,
“All the Berties,
“All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me
“I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me...”
The song about the financial crisis in 2008 references the hardships people faced in the area where CMAT grew up.
READ MORE
“I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn’t really happen to my family directly,” CMAT said in a recent interview.
“My dad had a job in computers, we didn’t really have any money, we weren’t affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed.
“Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they’d lost everything in the crash.”
The reference to Ahern in the song is not the first time CMAT has made her feelings known about the former Fianna Fáil politician who served as taoiseach between 1997-2008.
In an interview with Hot Press in 2023, she said if Ahern ran for the presidency she would “make it my personal f**king mission to make sure that he doesn’t win”.
Ahern has yet to confirm if he will be running in the presidential election this year, but his name has been included among those speculated to join the race. - Additional reporting from the Guardian
