FROM GREAT BLASKET

“UNIONISTS WILL HAVE to study Peig, and go to Irish college in the summer, and they won’t be allowed into university if they don’t pass Irish at A Level.”

The horror inherent in these words, spoken in a trembling voice by Ochon Mo Thoin of the Blasted Blasket Fund, a charity for victims of the teaching of the Irish language in the Irish Republic, cannot be understood by people who have not had to read the uber-maudlin autobiography of the Queen of the Blasket Islands, Peig Sayers, whose life has only recently been sold to an American streaming service for a horror series so ghoulish it carries its own special rating. And now, with possible joint authority being forced on Dublin and London because Unionists don’t want to bow down to Irish republican leadership in the Northern Ireland Assembly, word is out that Irish enthusiasts in the Dublin Parliament are planning to enforce Peig in what many of them secretly call the Occupied Six, to remind Unionism that it can always be worse.

“Unionism must understand,” insists Mo Thoin, “that compared to having to read Peig, the IRA campaigns they have been subjected to, are no more than small wind gusts. Don’t they understand that it was actually removed from the Dublin syllabus, it did so much damage. There are people – if you can still call them that – wandering the globe, like spectres, living dead, who have never recovered. Indeed, suicide by Peig is the fastest growing method of self-destruction in Ireland, north and south (the word spread on the internet). Go back to Stormont. I beg you. At least buy yourselves and your children time. You must think of the children!”