I WANT to say "I get it", which I do. But I also want to say "this is unfair, in fact, it’s even cruel."

I understand - partially - why some are irked by the return of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas. What I don’t get is the casual collateral damage: a whole generation of decent kids shamed because they thought they were doing the right thing back in 1984. Actually, scrub that - we were doing the right thing.

Band Aid was re-released yesterday to a flood of denunciation: it’s "colonial", a "white saviour narrative", it’s inherently "racist".

For those who weren’t alive at the time, let me tell you a little about my generation. Explanation is incumbent, I feel, as I’m at an age which means many weren’t there, and so don’t understand. It was another century, evidently, when this happened.

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Time doesn’t undo mistakes, but in the gulf of years which has passed a rather lumpen attitude has set in which takes recent history and subjects it to a crude stare. There’s an inability to see decades gone as anything other than a disgrace.

There was much in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s worth defending and celebrating. The freedoms many take for granted today wouldn’t exist if parents and grandparents hadn’t taken to the streets, or attempted to make the lives of others better.

Band Aid is an event worth championing; though it’s also worth reassessing, for there were naive errors in the song, certainly. The intention was faultless, though not the execution.

I recall the days after Michael Buerk’s report on the Ethiopian famine aired on the BBC. In my Northern Ireland grammar school, kids were horrified. The images of emaciated, dying children changed many young people back then. We’d grown up in a civil war and so were a pretty insular bunch, more concerned, understandably, about the Troubles, than events overseas.

But this time, the Troubles faded into relative insignificance. Children like us were dying. We arranged fund-raising events and wrote to MPs demanding they help. We genuinely cared. This, for me, was the very moment, when I became switched on - woke, you’d say today - about the terrible lives of others in faraway places. I was 14.

The Ethiopian famine made me start to care, and I still care to this day. It was an empathy-accelerant. After the Ethiopian famine, I’ve never remained unaffected by the suffering of people in lands I don’t know and have never visited. That’s down to the BBC and Bob Geldof’s Christmas record.

When the Band Aid single came out, me and my girlfriend Barbara - that’s how long ago this was, girls were still called Barbara - went straight to our local record store, the Pop-In, and spent all our pocket money, and any money we’d saved up, on buying as many singles of Do They Know It’s Christmas that we could afford. I think I’d a fiver and she had a few quid.

This wasn’t middle-class virtue signalling. Me and Barbara were poor kids from poor estates. Our parents worked in factories. Yes, we went to a good school because we’d passed exams, but that didn’t change the fact that our families had nothing, we’d never been on foreign holidays, and luxuries were rare and cherished. We just wanted to give everything we had to kids like us dying overseas.

Is that "colonialism"? Were we "white saviours"? Would you call such kids racist?

The Pop-In had a queue going out the door. Every kid I knew was buying that record. That’s the generation I want to tell you about.

Indeed, kids were sneered at for caring. Some parents called us "do-gooders". Establishment voices on TV asked why teenagers here should help save people dying of a famine caused by the wars and policies of Ethiopia’s government.

A line-up of all the participants in the original version of Do They Know It's Christmas?A line-up of all the participants in the original version of Do They Know It's Christmas? (Image: Redferns)

But for us kids, charity didn’t begin at home. It’s always the working-class willing to dig as deep as possible to help others, because we know what it means to go without. I may live a middle-class life today, but I’ve not forgotten my roots.

These events also started a journey for many kids, creating a generation which embraced anti-racism and marched against apartheid. From there, boys started supporting feminism, and straight kids began to back gay rights. Band Aid was part of a great awakening.

Is the song flawed? Yes. Of course Africans know it’s Christmas - especially in Ethiopia which was Christian long before Europe. Would it be better if there were more black voices? Yes, evidently, nobody disputes that.

But if Band Aid hadn’t ruthlessly torn at the heartstrings of young people in Britain, god knows how many more young people would have died in Ethiopia. People may see the video today and judge the images of dying, fly-covered children as exploitative - but that, I’m sorry, was the reality. Those were the pictures on the news. If you want people to hand over their “f***ing money” as Bob Geldof said, then you must make them feel.

Might it be better if Band Aid wasn’t re-released this year? Maybe. Perhaps it would be wiser to create a new song. But the re-release will still raise money and save lives, won’t it? Meanwhile governments here and overseas fail.

There are plenty of other songs to protest, if you really wish. There’s Ur So Gay by Katy Perry. Or is she safe from opprobrium after backing Kamala Harris? Or Picture to Burn by Taylor Swift with its threat to tell people that her ex is “gay”.

Is that okay? Or are these just songs?

Some artists play roles and experiment to find where the line is; others use music in an attempt to tell the truth. Trying to tell the truth in a way that pleases everyone is impossible, and sometimes the manner in which the truth is told can be clunky and ill-chosen.

But I’d sooner have a little truth, and I’d sooner have art that makes me care about other human beings, even if that art is flawed, than claim to live in a perfect moral bubble and reject the honest but imperfect attempts of others to make the world a better place.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.