Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

It's all a bit like that scene in Alien. Remember? The crew of the deep space mining ship Nostromo are sitting down to dinner and having a right old natter when Kane, played by John Hurt, who happens to reside in Ireland these days (A coincidence? Ed.), is stricken by violent spasms in the abdominal area. Much to the horror of his colleagues and much to the glee of the film's viewers, the dramatic seizures climax with Hurt's thorax exploding and the emergence of a fiendish alien head from his guts. Ugh! And that's exactly what happened in Ireland in February. The body politic, which could no longer endure the extraterrestrial within, began to convulsive and retch and out spewed the most disgusting slime the island has witnessed these past decades. And the island has seen some pretty awful stuff these past decades, I can tell you.

Where to begin? Actually, there's almost no point in doing a synopsis anymore as each day brings its own spectacular that puts the preceding one in the shade. Speechlessness would the only logical response, except that those of us charged with the noble office of punditry must carry on, even in the face of the most grotesque events. To sum up, then: the month of February 2005 will enter the history books as the time frame during which the true designs of the space-invader conspiracy known as Sinn Fein/IRA to subvert democracy on the island of Ireland was fully exposed. The enormity of what's come to light is staggering and it seems that all the little green men and women, from the organization's rank and file thugs who continue to murder and maim, to its smooth corporate operators who have spent the past decade laundering vast amounts of racketeering money, were running a shadow state with its own parliamentarians (Surely you mean "paramilitaries"? Ed), mass media apologists (right to the top of RTE, the state broadcaster), bars (republican publicans) and economy (provisional private banking).

The goal of the rulers of this parallel society, which came into being after a spacecraft landed in the north-eastern region of the island in the mid-20th century, was to infiltrate Irish society to the point where the parasite would kill the host, just as in Alien, and then assume control. If the balaclava had not slipped, the people of Ireland would have sat down one evening to their traditional bacon and cabbage dinner and then, just as they would be about to begin the ritual disputation on house prices, their bellies would have burst open and out would have popped replicants bearing convincing-sounding Irish names such as Aengus Ó Snodaigh, Pat Doherty, Bairbre de Brún, Alex Maskey, Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin and Martin Ferris. The good news is that the intruder cat is out of the bag, as it were, but the bad news is that life's not a movie so we can't go home after the credits stop rolling and put our feet up. Still, the creature's true face has been exposed and now the country knows what it's up against. This just in! The people are taking back the streets from the aliens. This one might have a happy end after all.