The 5th Column

Fianna Fáil's Prince Albert gets a rub

THE STATUE of the Famine Queen, Victoria, was removed from the front of Leinster House in the 1940s and sent to Australia (to where she transported so many Irish people) but a bronze monument to her hubby, Prince Albert, remains.

The Dáil's Prince Albert used to stand in the middle of Leinster Lawn, Leinster House's back yard, until he was shunted off to the side to make way for the Collins/Griffith/O'Higgins memorial. He is half-hidden by a hedge but has now been polished up with Irish taxpayers' money.

Sinn Féin Cavan/Monaghan TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin challenged Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy as to how much the taxpayer has been made to stump up to maintain this tribute to an anti-democratic, sectarian dynasty and a monument to the oppression of the Irish people.

'Champagne Charlie' McCreevy's gofer, PDer Tom Parlon, didn't even blush when he told the Sinn Féin TD that the Fianna Fáil/PD Coalition shelled out €9,080 for the pleasure of preserving privilege.

But why on earth does Bertie Ahern and the Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party want to cling on to their Prince Albert? Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (to give him his proper name) is probably the only non-national resident in Ireland that isn't threatened by the Coalition Government.

Not a Smart move by FF

WHEN Michael McDowell was up a lamp-post at the last general election he campaigned on the basis that we needed him in power with Fianna Fáil to keep an eye on the Soldiers of Destiny because the shifty lousers could not be trusted to play by the rules — and the 5th Column agrees with him!

Only this past Monday did Fianna Fáil Euro candidate Eoin Ryan disregard and break a number of laws when he canvassed in Dublin's O'Connell Street. Eoin's bandwagon ('Let's Get Goin' With Eoin') rolled into the headlines with a fleet of cool-looking, Ryan-liveried Smart cars, parked not only on the central pedestrian walkway but also with no tax and insurance.

Where are the ubiquitous wheel clampers — who haunt ordinary Dublin drivers day and daily — when parking offences are being committed so brazenly in the heart of the capital when we actually need them?

Ryan has admitted the offences (although he tried to blame his insurance company). So will Justice Minister Michael 'Zero Tolerance' McDowell clamp down on the rogue Ryan with a retrospective prosecution?

UUP cross over DUP flag

ULSTER UNIONIST pleas for 'unionist unity' (ie DUP transfers) to try and stop Sinn Féin in the EU elections will have been dented by the UUP's open ridiculing of DUP standard bearer Jim Allister's poster, which has the Union flag upside down. The upside-down flag foul-up was repeated on the front page of the DUP's website.

The Flag Institute (which probably has its office between the Train Spotters' Trust and the Cigarette Card Consortium) has flown into the row about the DUP not knowing which way up their cherished flag should go. "It does appear rather ironic that the DUP should do this given that they make such a play out of being British."

Apparently, flying the Union Jack upside down at sea is a sign of distress. Deliberately flying it upside down is an insult to the British monarchy. Did the DUP do it as a cunning ploy to win republican transfers and keep the UUP out?

Let's run that idea up the flagpole and see who salutes it.

Major fraudster to cough up

MAJOR CHARLES INGRAM, convicted of trying to cheat the TV quiz show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? out of £1 million, was told last week by the Court of Appeal in London that he and his wife will have to pay £40,000 in fines and costs in addition to the 18-month suspended sentences they got for deception.

The major fraud was, of course, booted out of the British Army for bringing disgrace on his uniform, regiment, queen and country by cheating. Shooting an Irish civilian would have kept him his job and earned him a promotion.

Kamikaze pigeons

IN 1946, while the Soviet Union was trying to catch up with the USA in the nuclear arms race, British scientists were working on another dastardly weapon of mass destruction — germ warfare suicide pigeons.

Cold War MI5 secret files released last week by the National Archives Office reveal that boffins at the War Office (in the days when it was actually called the War Office and not the Ministry of Defence) were looking at the future uses of Westminster's air force of homing pigeons, used in the Second World War for carrying messages from secret agents behind enemy lines. A new, secret organisation was launched — the Ad Hoc Committee on Carrier Pigeons.

Wing Commander William Rayner, of the Air Ministry's Pigeon Section, wrote:

"Pigeons can carry a load of two ounces over 100 to 200 miles. They are not detectable by radar. With the latest developments of explosives and bacterial science, I suggest that this possibility should be closely investigated and watched.

"A thousand pigeons, each with a two-ounce explosives capsule, landed at intervals on a specific target might be a seriously inconvenient surprise."

The War Office intelligence section, MI14, cooed: "It is clear that pigeon research will not stand still."

MI5 and the Pigeon Committee shelled out for a top-secret pigeon loft run by a retired British Army captain to carry out experiments with kamikaze pigeons. But the bird-brained scheme didn't get off the ground and the Pigeon Committee was grounded in 1950.

Kamikaze corgis

FREE WALES ARMY founder, Dennis Coslett, died last Thursday, 20 May, after a colourful career in which he made Fleet Street believe that he had dozens of kamikaze dogs hidden in the Black Mountains of Carmarthenshire, waiting to scamper down the slopes to blow up British Army convoys.

Coslett and his Free Wales Army comrades were seen as a bit of a joke by the English media but they marched in Dublin in 1966 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and developed links with the so-called 'Official IRA', which reportedly sold the FWA weapons, something which old and past Sticks don't like to talk about.

Coslett and Cayo Evans received 15-month jail terms for paramilitary offences in 1969 at the end of a 53-day trial that, rather conveniently, concluded on the very day that England's Charles Windsor was crowned Prince of Wales.

When one local hack interviewed Coslett, the Welsh militant fitted a harness to the back of his pet Alsation, Gelert, and said it would be loaded with gelignite for suicide missions. The story was picked up by Fleet Street and Coslett received hundreds of letters of complaint from outraged British bulldog lovers. If he'd plumped for pigeons instead of pooches, he might have got a grant from MI5.

Toilet humour

SIX HUNDRED delegates will flood into Belfast next year for the World Toilet Summit Conference. The event, in September 2005, will take place rather fittingly at the Waterfront Hall.

Also booked in to the Waterfront, this September, is the International Symposium on Human Behaviour and Fire. The two events are not related.