-Shops were prevented from opening on Sundays in Ireland until the mid-1990s as the populace feared that their patron goddess, Ourlady, would manifest in the form of Sweet Mary of the Divine Vengeance and wreak unholy havoc on the nation for defiling her day of worship. After a protracted series of negotiations with Mary’s representative on Earth, Joe Coleman, it was decided that Ireland would increase its annual export of geriatrics to Lourdes by 30% in exchange for the right to buy goods between the hours of 12 and 6pm on a Sunday. Mary, happy with the arrangement, celebrated by weeping tears of joy from the idols dedicated to her in grottos across the nation.-Ireland is run by a select order known as the Irish Mammies, to whom the moral uprightness of the state was entrusted when it became clear that the Catholic Church wasn’t as interested in keeping folks upright as it was in bending them over. The Irish Mammies in turn elect a council of 12 leaders, known as The Marys. It is from this pool of Marys that the President is drawn. The current Mary, Mary McAleese, ascended to the position of Mary Prime in 1998 and has steered Ireland through such tough times as the economic downturn, the death of St. Gerry Ryan and the war. According to the constitution, McAleese must be replaced after 14 years, 14 days and 14 hours. The next Mary will be David Norris.
-RTE
is the state-funded, national broadcaster. As part of its remit, RTE is required to allocate a certain percentage of its programming to cover events outside Dublin. It meets this obligation through Nationwide and the Angelus – a series of short 1 minute science-fiction vignettes about people in north Wicklow looking skywards at an armada of invading alien spaceships. RTE employees can be recognised by their dialect – nowhere else in the country will you hear the name of the nation’s police force pronounced as Gore-Dee, except on Ore Tee Ee.-The Gays. Ireland is full of gays. When a gay (or
quare as they are also known) comes of age, his homosexual sense starts tingling and draws him inexorably towards Dublin where he is initiated into The Scene through a series of bizarre, demeaning and perverse rituals that mostly involve putting pictures of his bollocks online. If a gay survives these first few months in Dublin, he is accepted into the warm embrace of The Scene and gets to have his picture featured on gay photo-blogs and socialise with drag queens. If he fails to make an impression, he will be sent into exile outside Dublin, where he will have to survive on once-a-month gay club nights in the smaller cities that dot the Irish landscape beyond the Pale. For a gay, there is no punishment worse than being deprived of dancing in a cloud of dry ice to Britney Spears on a regular basis. Female gays simply join a camogie team to deal with their sexual urges.-Ireland has produced a disproportionate number of literary and artistic giants. James Joyce’s Ulysses invented a whole new way for authors to be pretentious; U2’s Bono routinely saves the world and reminds us how uncaring we all are for not being as made of holy as He is, and Dana has charmed the world with songs such as “Sure Why Would You Want To Put That Up There When You Know Jesus Can See You?”, “The Ballad of Ronan Mullen” and “Smell Yo Incense”
-Ireland’s economy recently shrivelled away to nothing when it was revealed that the primary engine of economic growth – pretending things were worth a lot more than they actually were and then getting loans to sell them on – wasn’t sustainable. The Irish government is currently trialling a new engine of economic growth encapsulated by the buzz words The Smart Economy. No one is entirely sure what The Smart Economy will be, but we do know that it will involve Maths and Science and probably telecommunications, Information Technology and broadband. It’s a good thing that we sold our telecommunications network to an Australian company with no interest in investing in it then, isn’t it?
