5th Column Xmas Quiz 2004

While you're searching for the jokes in your DUP Christmas crackers, plump instead for some mildly brain-teasing turkeys we've rescued from this year's 5th Column. Ho, ho, ho!

1) Which former Minister in the Six-County Assembly kicked off the New Year by getting arrested for illegally blocking a road?

2) Which Irish sports commentator quoted Margaret Thatcher's "oxygen of publicity" during the soccer Euro 2004 final between Portugal and Greece when a lone fan ran onto the pitch?

3) The villagers in a rebel Zapatista stronghold of Mexico were given €5,000, an ambulance and the captain's shirt by a world-famous soccer team. Which team?

4) How Clean Is Your House star Aggie McKenzie had an even dirtier job before she became a household cleaning star on Channel 4. What was it?

5) Which unionist MP addressed a London rally of the Northern Ireland Springbok Club, a fusion of the White Rhino Club and the Rhodesia Forum, supporters of the old Apartheid regimes in southern Africa?

6) Simon Mann, close friend of Margaret Thatcher's son, Mark, and failed coup leader in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, was jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe for arms offences linked to the coup. He was also an SAS veteran who saw active service in the Six Counties. Where else might we have seen him before his failed Dogs of War episode?

7) Of whose security detail did European commission President Romano Prodi say: "They're so beautiful."

8) Which high-profile 26-County Labour Party figure had to pay the Revenue Commissioners "a six-figure sum" for unpaid taxes over 30 years?

9) UTV's It Shouldn't Happen on a TV Talent Show revealed that a British TV soap series nearly came a cropper when MI5 and the Terrorist Squad set up an ambush of one its secret storyline locations after thinking it was a republican active service unit's base. Which soap series?

10) Who topped the bill at the St Patrick's Day Concert at Belfast's City Hall?

11) The lead singer of which band defended the fire-bombing of McDonald's burger joints?

12) What did the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and the head of South Africa's neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, Eugene Terreblanche, thank Progressive Democrats President Michael McDowell for?

13) Why did Baywatch 'babe' Pamela Anderson go to war against the British Army?

14) Which Dublin Government Minister said that Ché Guevara was different from the IRA because the IRA killed people (and, presumably, Ché didn't)?

15) George Galloway MP, who appeared at West Belfast's Féile an Phobail, was expelled from the British Labour Party for opposing the war on Iraq and recently successfully sued the Daily Telegraph, won another legal battle this summer when former NIO Minister Adam Ingram sued him over references to Ingram's past in an Orange flute band in Scotland. What position does Ingram now hold in Tony Blair's government?

16) What unnatural act did the British Royal Navy allow to be officially practiced on its ships for the first time in its history "as an equal opportunities employer"?

17) When he spoke of the legitimate nationalist aspiration to a re-united Ireland and accused Tony Blair of failing to address concerns about policing, the RUC Special Branch, MI5, et al, the DUP's Ian Paisley Junior said of him: "These reprobate comments are the quotes of a terrorist sympathiser." Who is the Paisley Boy speaking about?

18) Bill Lowry was a guest speaker at the DUP annual beanfeast in Ballymena, where Ian Paisley made his infamous outburst that he wanted to humiliate the IRA. What was Bill Lowry's job until very recently?

19) Secret British Government Cold War files released in London by the National Archives Office revealed that scientists were working on a dastardly and deadly new weapon. What was it?

20) Peelers had to abandon their Strabane PSNI base because which key part of their top-security installation was struck by fire?

For answers, see end of features section.