Croke Park may be hosting Oasis in August, but it is Omni Park shopping centre in the nearby Dublin suburb of Santry that’s having its rock’n’roll moment right now. It comes courtesy of the video for “Euro-Country”, the new single from Irish country-pop singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, aka CMAT, in which the unremarkable complex serves as a warning against the dangers of unfettered greed.
“All the big boys, all the Berties/ All the envelopes, yeah they hurt me,” sings Thompson as she twirls through the two-storey building, home to an adjoining 11-screen cinema and Lidl supermarket. She isn’t railing against the Omni itself – the shopping centre, which underwent a major expansion at the height of the pre-crash Irish property boom, is an apt stand-in for the bonfire of turbocharged capitalism that swept Ireland during those feverish years, its flames fanned by populist head of government Bertie Ahern. Just so nobody misses the point, she is also wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Bertie”.
