FROM THE MAHOGANY GASPIPE SUMMER SCHOOL, WILD WEST COAST OF IRELAND

“IT’S NOT REALLY THE QUALITY, it’s the quantity,” explained Christy Penile-Implant of Save Us From Irish Poetry, a human rights group founded to support people whose lives have been destroyed by Celtic verse. “No other country on earth has so many fucking poets bombarding – yes, bombarding is the right word – its citizens with endless stanzas of relentless internal monologue. I put it down to the fact that the Irish find ordinary simple truthful conversation so difficult they parcel up what they should have said over the breakfast table and send it out as obscure poetry.

“That way they can say what they want and people still won’t understand it. Which is the object of all Irish talk anyway. And that’s just the stuff in English. Irish language poetry should carry a health warning, like cigarettes or cluster munitions; or nuclear waste. No one has ever done a study of how many school students have actually died as a result of the amount of Irish language poetry they have had to study. Forget your Magdalene Laundries and your Industrial Schools, we have people on our books who just babble Gaelic poetry lines all day. It’s like shell shock. Have you seen the size of the old text books? Then there’s the readings and the festivals. Oh, Jesus, make it stop! It’s inhuman treatment, it’s degrading treatment. It’s almost up there with the Banshees of Inisherin. But not quite. Nothing quite attains those heights.”

At this point, Mr Penile-Implant began to rock back and forth.

“Then there’s fucking Seamus Heaney. If Heaney had left a shopping list behind some cunt would be scanning it. If the Northern Irish Troubles produced one horror weapon, it wasn’t the car bomb, it was Heaney. We have a symptom called the Double Heaney which involves two Heaney poems wedged between a long Yates and a grumpy Kavanagh. It’s a sad sight watching someone afflicted with the DH, and it’s incurable. Requires huge amounts of pharmaceutical intervention. Was the Nobel Prize worth that?”

Mr Penile-Implant began to cry, and foam a little at the mouth.

“There are others but I won’t mention them because they are still alive and might sue. If they could ever take their heads out of their arses long enough. And yes, I’m a failed poet myself. Bitter, twisted, left behind by life, grinding out pointless verse after pointless verse all day long. I could have been a computer billionaire. Instead I’m condemned to a life of pentameter and incoherent rhyme. The Blank Verse, we call it – the thousand word stanza. And it’s terminal. But it doesn’t mean I don’t have a point. Does it? Does it …?”*

*Mr Penile-Implant broke off the interview there. – ED