Paisley Junior’s cottage hiccup

IAN PAISLEY JNR has insisted that his failure to register his second home at property speculator Seymour Sweeney’s Ballyallaght Farm Cottages in his own name is due to “an administrative hiccup at Land Registry”. DUP ministerial colleague Peter Robinson begs to differ.
Sweeney, a DUP member, is the tycoon behind the controversial plan for a commercial visitors’ centre at the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim. Junior, a junior minister in the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister, has been a keen supporter of Mr Sweeney’s enterprises.
Homophobic home-owner Paisley has protested that he bought his pad three years ago at the full market price but records have shown the property still in the name of Mrs Sweeney.
“I am aware that there is some sort of administrative hiccup in Land Registry,” the Paisley boy claimed.
The Land Registry comes under Peter Perfect’s remit as Finance Minister. In a written answer to an Assembly question, Junior’s party colleague said: “I can confirm that Land Registers is not responsible for any administrative irregularities at Ballyallaght Farm Cottages, Bushmills.”
Ian Paisley Junior badly needs a cure for his hiccups.

Foul deed evades Flying Squad

GUNMEN suspected of blasting out of the sky a rare pair of hen harriers – one of Britain’s most endangered species – have escaped a possible six-month jail sentence despite the harrier homicide taking place on the border of the British royal estate at Sandringham.
The birds were witnessed plummeting to the ground when local nature wardens at a bird sanctuary heard loud gunshots at the estate, in Norfolk, on 24 October. The police were immediately called. Three men with guns loitering at the scene of the crime were questioned. One was a man going under the name of Prince Harry. Taking time off from whizzing around in tanks with the British Army, Harry denied any knowledge of the incident and, as any Irishman questioned by police in England knows, that’d good enough for Sherlock Holmes’s Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.
The birds’ bodies have since mysteriously gone missing and with them all evidence of any foul deed. Police have confirmed that no charges are now being contemplated.
If the suspects thought to have shot the rare birds had been refugees, I bet The Sun and the Daily Mail would be screaming for them to be strung up - the refugees, I mean, not the birds.

High-tailing it from the Taliban

WHILE Prince Harry is busy blasting our defenceless feathered friends to bits while he’s safe at home partying, his less privileged colleagues in the British Army are literally taking the high road to get out of being posted to Afghanistan.
Scottish soldiers fearful of being shot up the Khyber Pass are taking Class A drugs so that they get caught by the Royal Military Police and thereby dodge a bullet in the war zone.
Seventeen soldiers in a 500-strong battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders face being booted out of the British Army after testing positive for heroin and cocaine. And that’s just the ones who were in the location that the drugs-testing team swooped on during a week-long break in Mexico.
One soldier later told Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper:
“I can assure you that these guys meant to get caught. It’s the quickest and best way to get out of the armed forces because of the zero tolerance policy over drugs.”
One of the busted Brits added:
“We did it because we don’t want to get blown up in Afghanistan. Some might call us cowards but they have never stared death in the face.”
Nor has Prince Harry.

Marching orders

MORE than 1,100 soldiers have been dismissed from the British Army since January 2006 for using Class A drugs.
Not one soldier has ever been kicked out in 30 years for killing an Irish civilian.

Bus-ted

MY well-travelled radical contemporaries at Schnews.org bring us a tale of one over-literal German school pupil finding that bus bosses and the police (not unsurprisingly) lack a sense of humour.
Known, for legal reasons as ‘Sirin F’, the fare-dodging fräulein has been riding buses free after finding that a local law bans fare-dodgers only if they “do so surreptitiously”. So, spotting the obvious legal loophole, Sirin does it very publicly in a T-shirt that says: “Legal note: I have not paid the fare and am thus a fare dodger.”
Sadly for her, cops thought this wasn’t the ticket and nicked her.