Top Issue 1-2024

9 November 2006 Edition

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Fifth Column

Granny get your gun

An antique IRA gun used against the Black and Tans that may be worth thousands of euro is frantically being searched for before it disappears without trace after it was handed over to the Guards as part of Michael McDowell's gun amnesty.

The small, pearl-handled lady's pistol (the sort of thing the likes of the demure Rita O'Hare would have been expected to carry back in the 1920s) was handed in at a Dublin Garda station by a Mr Joe Dowling after it had been passed down through the family from his grandmother.

"The story we had in the family was that my grandmother was defending women and children down in the cellar in Moore Street when the Tans were coming through the town," Joe explained.

"She was a native of Dublin, born off Abbey Street, so that would have been her domain around that area."

But when Marshal McDowell announced his gun amnesty, honest Joe handed his pearly pistol over for decommissioning.

Auctioneer Stuart Cole said that it would be hard to put a monetary value on the piece but, if the story is true, it could be a priceless piece of Irish history.

Willie gets his gun

Someone else who lost his gun is Prince William Windsor (aka William Wales), an officer cadet at Britain's Sandhurst Military Academy and second in line to the British throne.

Prince Willie somehow managed to mislay an SA80 rifle during firing practice. After reportedly getting "an absolute rollicking", Willie Wales borrowed one of his chums' pushbikes and pedalled all over the academy, frantically scouring every nook and cranny where one might just misplace one's deadly weapon.

Miraculously, another cadet saved the royal arse by presenting a rifle and professing that he had 'picked it up by mistake'.

That nifty little manoeuvre got witless Willie out of a very deep foxhole because the very serious offence of losing a top-class weapon would have made it difficult for the brass hats at Sandhurst to give the 24-year-old royal sprog the prestigious 'Sword of Honour' for the top cadet.

Imagine if the man who would be king flunked the top prize with just a couple of weeks to go after being trumpeted all over the media as the odds-on favourite. And as Willie's granny owns the shop (being commander in chief of the British Army and the whole kit and caboodle), it would be really embarrassing if her little boy doesn't get his sword.

Naughty Nazi

The personal bodyguard of neo-Nazi nut job and British National Party full-time führer Nick Griffin has been exposed having three-in-a-bed sex romps in contravention of the BNP's Aryan family values.

While Griffin is being retried at Leeds Crown Court this week on race hate charges, bodybuilder Martin Reynolds (37), who is married, has been trawling a teenage dating website in between bedroom frolics with his fraulein and friends. And the BNP's biggest bonehead took photos of his exploits but now his private saucy snaps have found their way into the Sunday tabloids.

Reynolds told reporters:

"It's straight, consenting sex, heterosexual sex, and I've got nothing at all to be ashamed of. I just wish the pictures had been taken in summer, when I'm usually a couple of stone lighter." But little brighter.


An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland