TUT’s short for TUTINESS, not   by Perkin Warbeck

The Unionist Times self-admitted habit of rabbit punching fake news in the neck went into lapse mode somewhat last week, not..

This happened when they dispatched two of their crack reporters north of the Black Sow’s Dyke to cover the Sinn Féin-provoked Election.

And just who were this duo of Von Suppé-stars chosen to lead the Light Cavalry Overture for TUT?

First up was Kitty Holland who accompanied her pop Eamonn ‘Yes, we can ’ McCann as he plimsolled the pavements of, curiously enough, a prim polled consticuency. In this touching father and daughter, erm, re Union, both of them are pictured wearing near-matching wooly beanie hats. Sorta to give an, erm, Edge to their  an across the generation vibe.

(Did some mention I for Ivanka ? Will that lanky heckler down at the back please desist !)

-‘Yes, I am under pressure’, he says as we set out in the mainly Protestant, comfortably-off Kilfennan area of Derry’s Waterside. ‘But all we can do is try’

(Try? As in, say, try to impress the Southern Yunes by canvassing in a Northern Yune parish? Surely not, Shirley ! )

They knock on a door.

‘When he asks what I’m doing ‘up here’ anyway, I explain I’m supporting my father. He throws his head back laughing. ‘Eamonn McCann’s your daddy? God love you’.

(Not just U2 but E2 also: E for Eamo, E for Embedded Journo).

The miracle of knocks continues. Another door, another knock.

-I say: ‘You know he’s neither orange nor green’. She guffaws before closing the door.

E, father of I, says:

-‘ It suits Sinn Féin too “to divert attention from the fact they have lost the radical edge they once had”.

(That would be ‘edge’ with a lower case e, then).

– The breakthrough shows people are tired of sectarian politics, PBP believe.

For more years than he can remember to care, The Perkin has never been quite able to make out jsut what is that Eamo stands for, or in this case, runs for.

Is he an Anarcho-Syndicalist or is he just a Narky anti-Shinner ? That sorta thingy.

We do know he is neither green nor orange : both he and his daugher (both of the same parish) say so. And, of course, The Unionist Times (for that is the parish!) is never either economical or prodigal with the truth, which goes without saying so.

So, what then? Could it be that Eamonn (note how the two n’s meet) is a (gulp) Red? As in (gasp) the Red of the Arsenal Gansey.

Let the Prophet before the People speak; indeed, as he did so in one of his valedictory columns as The Man who is Thurday in TUT before he took leave of absence (for how long, oh Lord, how long ?) on the apocalyptic date of December 31, 2015:

-Arsene Wenger can teach us all a lesson in dececncy.

Against a background of major clubs paying non-triers up to a million a month, endless hoopla and hype around the aptly-titled transfer market, phoney melodrama on the managerial merry-go-round, venerable clubs used as money-laundering operations by oligarchs bearing stolen billions, and much else along the same depressing lines, Wenger and Primorac stand out as beacons of integrity, indomitable true believers in the spirit of the game. They have that very, very rare thing in top-flight football – ordinary decency. They are among the handful who allow the rest of us to keep the faith.

All true lovers of football want this to be Arsenal’s year’.

Now, say what you will about Eamo’s beliefs (political, ar ndoigh) what he does emphatically understand is the importance of language, and the precision thereof.

And yet, even as he raises the fluted glass of his favourite tipple , Arsene Liqueur, to his admiring lips, one cannot but puzzle at his precise choice of words. Take two, at random, from above :

‘Sectarian politics’ : now, that has always been, since times immoral, the catchphrase of choice of the Morally Superior and Disinterested Referees from Khakishire on the Mainland. Indicating that the strife which is rife in Nornevenland is fundamentally a religous kerfuffle.

It is that, of course but also, a deal more. Indeed, a bog-oak and deal more. Otherwise, how come there are atheistic Green and atheistic Orange at both blogger and loggerheads, each with the other?

‘Football’: meaning, of couse, soccer. The use of ‘football’ by Eamo would seem to indicate he is at least more more Orange than Green in this regard. And possibly even more Arsenal Red than Orange itself.

Oh, did one mention that the Decent Skin Féiner, Arsene, is on a mere 7 millions squids a year and that the terrace-house Arsenal worshippers on the terraces have only to fork out a paltry 100 plus squids a game to keep the penurious, low waged Monsieur Wenger’s head above l’eau ?

No? Mea culpa, for this omission.

Let the last line of this first electoral foray so be with the deatached reporter, Ivanka McCanka :

-Whatever the outcome, this canvasser will be with the candidate for tea in Sandino’s on March 4th. See you there, but only if you voted for him.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Peter Murtagh is the second Von Souper, oops, Von Suppé Star from the  Light Cavarly Overture of The Unionist Times..

‘Michelle O’Neill speaks her mind at tribute to slain IRA gunmen

In the tiny Tyrone village of Clonoe, her home town, brightness flowed from the chancel windows of St Patrick’s Church, the result of a spotlight illuminating an altar display celebrating St Valentine.

Otherwise, the large church car park was mostly in jet-black, wintry darkness. A small plaque, gradually being hidden by an expanding memorial fir tree, gives the IRA version of the events of 25 years ago last Thursday.

At 10.40pm that night, it says, a lorry carrying a number of IRA volunteers entered the car park and was ambushed by undercover soldiers of the SAS, the Special Air Service special forces unit of the British Army’.

And now here’s the KICKER.

-‘What the plaque does not reveal is what had happened beforehand. British army’.

Go therefore , Pete, into repeat mode:

‘First, the lorry had been hijacked and stolen. Then the IRA gang drove it to Coalisland police station which they sprayed with machine gun fire before escaping, only to run into an obviously well-informed ambush.’

Nice choice of double-adjective, Pete: ‘well-informed’.

But then, as any well-informed fake-news shunning reader who takes The Unionist Times knows  right well, this policy of , erm, slight regurgitation is the defining feature of this Organ of Rex Accord.

One has but to take the most cursory of glances at its curse-of-God, oops, current, on-going coverage of WW1.. Perhaps no other caped crusading unit of the media , with the possible exception of its broadcasting wing, RTE, has done more herculean work to reinstate the Forgotten Heroes of Hibernia, Joxer and Whacker (J.A.W.) , to the pantheon of the national consciousness.

Joxer and Whacker, of course, were the prototype of the indomiabtle Dublin Fusiliers who, armed only with the JAW Bones of an Ass gallantly fought the hell hounds of the hun hordes to a stand swill in the mud and the blood and the guts of the gick-stenched trenches of the Great Donkey Derby aka WW1.

These one-time Loosers, the ultimate gas men who, having been shamefully edited out of the National Gag-book by the anal-retentive, grim Jimmies and other  Shinners, are now the Winners.

Now at last we can see in a Place of Worship, the interior of which is possibly more familiar to Peter Murtagh than the interior of St. Patrick’s Church in Clonoe, to wit, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the Dublin Fusiliers are commemorated and celebrated within the chancel windows where the Aprons are unfurled: from those of the Queen’s Butchers to those of the Roy Masons.

Take a bow, The Unionist Times.

Re-spect.

But where the real, continuity re-spect is earned is in their in-house policy of never EVER namechecking the exploits of the Joxer and Whacker without contexting their exploits.

Thus, while JAW were doing their hilarious take off of Somme Enchanted Evening their comrade in arms and other gunmen from the Mainland Regiments were at the Chemical Alleys of the Battle of Loos where, despite introducing poisoned gas as a weapon du jour and outnumbering the real krauts, 2-1, ended up being well and truly trounced, and by a cricket score too.

Howzat, Herr Howitzer !.

The first use of gas by the British was at the Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915, but the attempt was a disaster. Chlorine, codenamed Red Star, was the agent to be used (140 tons arrayed in 5,100 cylinders), and the attack was dependent on a favorable wind. However, on this occasion the wind proved fickle, and the gas either lingered in no man’s land or, in places, blew back on the British trenches.^[8] This debacle was compounded when the gas could not be released from all the British canisters because the wrong turning keys were sent with them. Subsequent retaliatory German shelling hit some of those unused full cylinders, releasing more gas among the British troops.^[26] Exacerbating the situation were the primitive flannel gas masks distributed to the British. The masks got hot, and the small eye-pieces misted over, reducing visibility. Some of the troops lifted the masks to get some fresh air, .lifted the masks to get some fresh air, causing them to be gassed.

In no account of the war experiences of Joxer and Whacker does The Unionist Times fail, EVER, to repeat, with Pete-like even-handedness, the above detailed account from the, erm, Loosers’ Enclosure.

What? One said, WHAT ?

Wait a moment, s’il vous plait, till The Perkin adjusts his ear-trumpet.

Kindly repeat your question, Madame:

-Can one give chapter and verse of where these balanced addenda are invariably inserted by The Unionist Times ?

By all means.

The Perkin’s inner female fact checker – Ms. Kathleen Mavourneen – is on the job:

There is no quick-fix solution here, folks. We crave both your indulgence and forbearance.

It may take for years, and (gulp) it may take forever.