BY PATRICK PEARSE TONE CONNOLLY KEVIN BARRY BORU, SECTARIAN EDITOR “THEY’RE THE only ones doing anything positive to bring about a United Ireland.” Joe (not his real name) has been a Sinn Fein voter all his life. “I did a five-stretch in the Kesh and two more in Port Laoise, so I’m Republican to my…

BELGRADE, THURSDAY ARE IRELAND and Russian on the verge of war? Not since 1898, when the Skibereen Eagle announced that it was “keeping its eye on the Emperor of Russia” (the Czar) have Irish-Russian relations sunk so low. It began with Irish Foreign Minister and one-time/part-time Prime Minister Micheal Martin praising a dead Irishman killed…

SCRUTINY DESK BESTSELLING AMERICAN WRITER Malcolm Gladwell, author of books focusing on strange and odd aspects of history and life, has found himself in a position that might make him the subject of one of his tomes. “It isn’t his books that interest us,” says Dr Albert Mengele, of the Der Tod Macht Frei Institute,…

ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR “THEY HAVE become so frequent as to be almost normal.” So says Heckler Koch, a research analyst at OK Corral Investments, a New York hedge fund with several long positions in the weapons and firearms sector. “And once a thing attains normality, it is ripe for commercial exploitation. Witness sex, relationships, prisons, courtrooms,…

IRELAND DESK “IT’S A DISGRACE,” said Mutton Ceann, an anti-slavery activist at the Niall of the Nine Hostages Foundation, a Left-Wing Think Tank supported by Hollywood celebrities, frustrated librarians and unemployed revisionist historians. “Dublin was founded on slavery, built on slavery and virtually sweats slavery from its stones. I once had to work here and…

RELIGIOUS DESK HOLD ON to your hats, because humans have already gone extinct, says a leading eco-scientist. “Yes, we went extinct at 3.35 pm Greenwich Meantime last Wednesday,” says Professor Peter Cook of the We’re All Going To Die Institute in Southern California. “Our habitat was completely destroyed and we were not far behind. So…

BY OUR BREXIT CORRESPONDENT, NIGEL MOGG REES IN A REMARKABLE turn of events, the Irish Government, in conjunction with the European Union, has decided to offer special passports to residents of Northern Ireland, who because they wish to maintain their Britishness to the utmost cannot take up an Irish Passport, to which they would ordinarily…

BY GEORGE ST GREAVES, SPORTS REPORTER IT IS THE nearest thing to a religious relic that England possesses – if you discount Paul Gascoigne’s Fog On The Tyne single – Bobby Moore’s red No 6 shirt, worn the day England beat West Germany 4-2 to win the World Cup in 1966. And it’s gone missing.…

ECONOMICS DESK “WHEN IS A JOB not a job? When it’s bullshit.” So says Walter Hybrid, CEO of Systems Teams Projects Core Strategies And Total Solutions Inc, a Chicago based consultancy which advises on useless corporate positions, redundant careers and pointless tasks. In his new book Employment Without A Real Job Hybrid says that soon…

BY OUR ANIMAL CORRESPONDENT, NAT FAUNA IT HAS BEEN the Holy Grail of animal studies for decades: talking to the dumb brutes. Well, it’s allegedly happened off Australia, and the results are not quite what scientists expected. “Yeah, we established this really dope computer code, that reads dolphin signals, like, and translates them into human…