Songfacts®:

• "An Cat Dubh" is Gaelic for "The Black Cat." English is the common language in Ireland, but schoolchildren are also required to learn Gaelic. Bono never picked it up though - in 2011 there was an awkward moment when he met Queen Elizabeth II and she spoke some Gaelic to him, which he didn't understand.
  
  The song's lyrics are all in English.
• Bono sings about a cat and a blackbird in this song, but never gets too specific. He admitted, "It's definitely about sex," and in the book U2 By U2, elaborated: "This image of temptation, a cat sleeping beside a dead bird in suburban Dublin, and playing with it, the way they do, cat stalks the bird, kills it, and then shakes it about. And somehow knowing the sexual side of that, desire and innocence, and the way it can play with you."
• The third track on U2's debut album, Boy, "An Cat Dubh" segues together with the next track, "Into The Heart." For live performances, the band always played them together.
• Bono's lyric may have been inspired by an affair he had after a falling-out with his girlfriend, Ali. He married Ali in 1982.