'THE only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience ... a celebrity with a cause. Oh dear."

That was the message for students at Harvard when, in the same way that the speaker had been granted an audience with His Holiness, The Pope, they were granted an audience with His Even Holierness The Bono. It's a typical utterance from the voice of U2. He specialises in little, self-deprecating touches like that.

But Bono has certainly made a good career out of causes, for all his sighing 'oh dears' and what a lot of causes there have been down the years. When it comes to his conscience, he has been there, done that, and probably sold you the T-shirt.

There was Northern Ireland in Sunday Bloody Sunday and Live Aid, which opened up America for U2, and Free Nelson Mandela, and Greenpeace, not to mention Amnesty, Nicaragua, El Salvador. Bono appeared with the Mothers of the Disappeared on Chilean TV to demand General Pinochet reveal where the bodies were buried. On the Zoo TV tour, he stopped singing each night to take live broadcasts from Sarajevo, when the city was under siege.

Most recently, just as U2's career appeared to be winding down after the failure (in their own terms) of the Pop album, Bono has emerged from Where Are They Now? hell to front the Drop The Debt campaign, aimed at sparing the Third World from the burden of crippling loans repayments. And behold, U2 are once again, the headlines assure us, the biggest band in the world.

It may be, as Bono says, that the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience, but he has also proven that the only thing which sells more tickets, and shifts more units, than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience too.

Bono even jumped on to the bandwagon of the recent anti-capitalist protests at the G8 summit in Genoa. "Violence is not right," was his line on that, "but the anger is understandable in the face of the ever-widening gap of equality on the planet between the haves and the have-nots."

Bono's is the classic rock star stance siding with the downtrodden against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the Third World against the First but, ultimately, the stance only goes beyond cliche if U2 genuinely are an alternative to what they oppose. And if U2 offer an alternative to global capitalism, then vodka offers an alternative to alcoholism.

Nothing more exemplifies the excesses and obscenities of capitalism than Bono's chosen
industry. Most rock stars acquire wealth and spend it with the lavish prodigality of the
average African dictator, and U2 are no different.

Not in the acquiring the current Elevation tour, the European leg of which ended last night with a second concert at Slane, is already the highest grossing, ever. Nor in the spending, if the rumours of the thousands spent on a post-Slane party last weekend for the band's VIP friends are anything to go by.

The party would not have made much of a dent in U2's collective wealth, mind. U2 may not be quite up there with Bill Gates, but the band's total wealth of 475 million pounds IR is still more than sufficient to put them fifth in Ireland's own league table of riches, easily outstripping the likes of Ryanair supremo Michael O'Leary, Margaret Heffernan, the Smurfits, Fergal Quinn, Ben Dunne, Peter Barry, and Larry Goodman.

As for the other designated villains of Irish life, regularly denounced by the legions of Fintan O'Tooles and Fintan O'Toole wannabees in the liberal media for their obscene pursuit of wealth, they don't come near. Charles Haughey, to his eternal sorrow, could scarcely afford Bono's annual bill for wraparound shades. Liam Lawlor? By rock star standards, a pauper.

If there are fat cats, the figures clearly show, then U2 are top cat; if there's a Golden Circle, Bono is King Midas.

And like all their fellow multinationals, U2 have only one aim: worldwide b(r)and domination at the expense of all smaller, local cultural differences and rivals. Just as every teenager must have the same designer sports gear, with the name of the label displayed with vulgar prominence, and the same mobile phone with "wacky" "personalised" ringtone, so they must have their U2 CDs and tour T-shirt, concert video and Drop The Debt coffee mug.

That is not an alternative to rapacious global capitalism. It is rapacious global capitalism; and the bloated, corporate, money-making, franchise-spinning monster that is U2 these days operates with a ruthless efficiency, against which most of those who conform to the traditional caricature of the Western capitalist, demonised by Bono's friends in the anti-G8 movement, could not dream of competing.

The Forbes Rich List estimates that the chief executives of America's biggest companies take home an average pay of 83 cents per $1,000 of sales, and $13.21 for each $1,000 of profit they generate. That is hardly excessive when U2, at this stage of their career, must be looking at retaining more than 20 per cent of their product turnover. If CEOs took what Bono & Co take, they would have to be paid at least $200 out of every $1,000 of profit.

Bono gets away with it, though, because he's a rock star, and they are deemed immune from contamination by capitalism, even when far wealthier than, say, the head of Pepsico (whose share options, Forbes estimates, amount to a mere $16 million). He gets away with it, too, by wrapping himself in post-modernist irony, seemingly aware of all the absurd contradictions.

"I've seen great minds disappear up their own ass, strung out on self-importance," he told those Harvard students. "I'm one of them."

That's why he let himself be mocked in The Simpsons. Because he knows how silly all this rock star business is really.

But anyone who has seen Bono cavorting about the stage lately would be hard-pressed to see much of that supposed irony behind the overblown rock clichés. There's a cult of personality here so far advanced that its devotees see nothing wrong when a recent interviewer begins a dialogue with Bono with the words: "First, I'd like to thank you for all you do for humanity."

Nor, indeed, when an academic from the University of Colorado delivers a paper which credits U2's music with offering a critique of "the culture of materialism and excess" and "our mass- mediated consumerist lives".

Listening to this sycophantic guff, one is reminded of nothing so much as the scene in Monty Python's Life Of Brian when Brian, pursued by vast crowds who think he's the Messiah, tries to make them understand that they don't actually need Messiahs, they only need to find their own way.

"You're all individuals," he tells them. "Yes," the crowd choruses back in unison, "we are all individuals."

That sounds like Slane all over.

Thankfully, the salivating groupies masquerading as journalists will have to find something else to rave about now because the European stretch of Monty Python's Life Of Bono available soon on CD, video, and DVD; please have your credit card handy has come to a halt. Y'all don't come back now.

There was, of course, one crucial difference between Brian and Bono.

The crowds in the original film thought that Brian was God, but Brian knew that he wasn't. Has anyone told Bono yet?