We were all flying without wings back in the heyday of Irish boy band Westlife. The group were formed in Dublin in 1998 and rose to international popularity during the early 2000s. The new release of their anniversary album, 25: The Ultimate Collection, affords an opportunity to reflect on the band’s story. They emerge as bold and brash, but also as airbrushed as an advertisement for a new housing development in Dublin.

Irish music manager Louis Walsh took five young men and handed them to British music mogul Simon Cowell. Some of the band members were from the west of Ireland, from a generation whose older brothers had left for London and Boston in the 1980s with a bag and a prayer.

The songs were almost aggressively un-Irish. Free from political statement or critical reflections on the place they came from. Instead, they put out American soft rock from the 1970s and 80s, which they delivered in close harmony and in matching knitwear, sitting on stools, off which one of them would occasionally rise for the key change.

It was, in the most literal sense, a performance of aspiration. And Ireland in 2001 understood aspiration.

The Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan once described a trad music (Irish traditional music) session as a frenetic spinning and spiralling whirl where kids fuelled on Fanta were thrown around and everyone felt like the spiral might get so strong as to free everyone from the pull of Earth’s gravity. Much of the way we were in Ireland in the........

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