Ireland briefly glimpsed into the gift horse’s mouth and promptly blew its brains out. Not once, but twice. First Trinity College de-Berkeleyed its library block on grounds that would also have caused it to burn the works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.
Queen’s University Belfast was initially appalled. How could it possibly emulate such an act of pagan barbarism? It did not have a graduate of such global significance to defenestrate to prove that it could be every bit as ignorant as those toffs in Dublin. Poor Queen’s! But then it heard that George Mitchell, the heroic Sysiphus that pushed the rock of the peace proess repeatedly up the hill and finally got it to lodge securely at the top, had been merely mentioned, but not accused of any wrong-doing in the vast Epstein archive, which also probably named Seamus Heaney, Mother Teresa, Noah and the Virgin Mary. With all the scrupulous grace of a tanked-up punishment-squad on the Woodvale at midnight, now it was Queen’s turn, and out comes the sawn-off shotgun and off come George Mitchell’s kneecaps.
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