They may be called the Meteors, but when the big winners of Ireland's most prestigious music awards were announced last night, it wasn't exactly a bolt from the blue.
U2 scooped three awards: Best Album for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Best Live Performance for their Croke Park gigs last summer, and Best Irish Band for, well, just being the best Irish band around. Bass player Adam Clayton was there to collect the group's awards.
The sixth Meteor Ireland Music Awards, held at the Point, were marked by a comforting inevitability: besides U2's predictable if well-deserved win, Ireland's other heavy hitters, Westlife, won Best Irish Pop Act for the sixth year in a row. That puts them firmly in the boyband comfort zone. Today FM's Ray D'Arcy was voted Best DJ by a public who knows a crackling radio personality when it hears one.
The only loose cannons in this carefully calibrated event were The Pogues, who were presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award - not for their heroic feats of pub-crawling but for the fine body of work they have amassed during their colourful 23-year career.
The re-formed (but hardly reformed) outlaws of Celtic punk were due to close last night's event in the company of The Dubliners. Not that there weren't a few surprises during this 2½-hour-plus extravaganza. Leeds band Kaiser Chiefs pipped Franz Ferdinand to Best International Band, while young Tipperary singer/songwriter Gemma Hayes beat relative old-timers Mary Black and Sinead O'Connor to win Best Irish Female Singer.
The even younger Laura Izibor won the Hope for 2006 Award; the budding R&B star is signed to Britney Spears's label, so hopes are high for her.
Even those presenting awards were plucked from the same pool of local celebrities, TV presenters, reality-show participants, ex-boyband members and ex-boyband wives. Towering over them all were actors Stephen Rea and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and towering over those two was the mighty Larry Gogan. The most pleasant non-surprise of the evening was veteran social campaigner Fr Peter McVerry winning the Humanitarian Award for his work with homeless people, along with €100,000 for his charity, the Aruppe Society.
The Meteors will be broadcast on Sunday at 9.30pm on RTÉ 2.
