DUBLIN

AS IT EMERGES that Irish soldiers were following force protection protocols when they fired warning shots around a teenager intent on stabbing one of their chaplains to death in Co Galway, commentators who know about such things are asking if this was, in all the circumstances, the best response to such an incident?

“The bastard was cutting the priest into small pieces and their protocol is to fire warning shots, that appears a somewhat underwhelming response considering the threat presented. Sixteen or not, he should have been blown away – immediately.”

Colonel Bronson Clintrock, late of the Green Berets, who runs his own private security firm, thinks that the Irish Army needs to come off the fence in its responses when it’s a matter of life and death.

“I know they’re a bunch of peaceniks with a large red streak running through them; I know they would rather chow down with a bottle of whiskey than go in hard; and I know that they have spent most of their time policing other people’s fights over the decades, including a fight by some of their own people to free the last remaining portion of their land occupied by Britain, but we definitely won’t go there; and I realize that – God help us – they still actually believe in the United Nations, but this – this is ridiculous. The poor guy was being knifed to death, and the protocol says fire warning shots. Luckily, the soldiers were able to wrestle the attacker away – top marks for bravery there, and luckily, the priest is still alive. But if they hadn’t been so courageous and he had died and it emerged that only warning shots were fired because that was the existing force protection protocol – ouch!”