BY OUR CRAIGYHILL OFFICE STAFF

ULSTER UNIONISTS PREPARING to celebrate the Twelfth of July yet again have felt the winds of change swirling around their bombastic bonfires in the form of a new European Union study that suggests their numbers will soon be less than that of Ukrainian draft dodgers on the island of Ireland.

Hidden in Plain Sight, produced by the little-known Project James II, a Vatican-funded research group, has discovered that the recent UK threat to send illegal migrants to Rwanda had a particular effect on Ukrainian men hiding out in Britain from the war in their own country, causing thousands of them to flee to Ireland to join the tens of thousands of their compatriots already enjoying refuge on the Emerald Isle.

“There are so many Ukrainians dodging conscription in Ireland now that within a few decades Unionists will be about as influential as local Travelers here,” says Oisin McDonagh-Phadraig, a columnist for the influential website Shite and Unions. “I hope they won’t be demanding halting sites all over the place. These Twelfth celebrations are fine up in the North but they’d be an environmental nightmare if they spread. How could we possibly achieve net zero emissions with a Craigyhill every couple miles?”

Former DUP politician Davy Shout, who lost his parliamentary seat in the recent UK General Election, and is applying for an Irish passport so that he can retire peacefully to his vineyard in France once his peerage arrives, insists that he would be willing to see a unified island if it were Ukrainian. “Anything as long as it isn’t Fenian,” he says. “I’ll even start learning Ukrainian. And remember Ukraine begins with the letters UK.”