BY MARK GROUPING IN BELFAST

FEARS AMONG Northern Ireland’s Unionists, that their beloved Northern Ireland Centenary Stone, soon to be erected at Stormont, had perhaps been the victim of an IRA attack, proved premature, when officials pointed out that the stone’s resemblance to a piece of human skull with a large bullet wound in it was pure coincidence.

“It is creepy though,” remarked Susan Marigold, an Alliance Party supporter from the Malone Road in Belfast. “You look at it and the first thing that enters your head – oh, I shouldn’t have said that – that comes to your mind, is a bullet wound. Lough Neagh and all those county borders. Yeah, creepy. I’ve been living here far too long.”

“President Kennedy!” insisted Michael Collins Pearse Connolly, a former Republican prisoner now living in Dallas, Texas, where he beat and extradition warrant in 1989. “It speaks Grassy Knoll to me. Have you seen those pictures of JFK lying on the slab? Are they gonna put it on the grass at Stormont? Good luck!”

Others saw a large block of Swiss cheese. “I was sure it was cheese,” said Allan Brainded who refused to give his affiliation and said he was living in doorways all over Northern Ireland. “I’m a recovering drug addict, you see, that’s all I am. A hundred years of Northern Ireland? Jesus, it feels like a thousand! Only a hundred, you say?”

“I thought it was vandals had smashed it!” remarked Sister Gabrielle Byrne, a lesbian nun living on the Shankill Road in Belfast. “We get a lot of vandalism at our little LGBTI + house here on the Shankill. Can’t really understand why. We’re just here to bring the good news that God loves all of us, equally. And you’re sure it wasn’t vandals? Well, I’m sure it will be given the respect it deserves. I suppose being made of stone, it has a lot of symbolism. Stones having played such a central role here for so long, like.”

The New IRA commented on the stone in a terse statement: “It wasn’t us. Yet.”