Looking for the lighter side of Easter’s news during dark times

Cead Mile Failte to you all at the close of an amazingly surreal Easter season which commands me to totally avoid any mention of explosive happenings all over our globe and to focus instead on creating a bit of good old bit of craic for all of us wherever we reside

Even though it gets more and more difficult by the hour to drive sharp slivers of levity into the gravities surrounding us all, the exercise has always worked well for those with Celtic blood in their arteries down the centuries. Accordingly, even though I will have to labor more than I wish to, I will do my very best to inscribe a wry smile at least on many of your faces. Let’s have a bit of old-fashioned craic.

Can we begin with the news from the Ukraine that they have elected a comedian as their new leader and are claiming they are the first country in the world to do so. I honestly believe this to be an untruth because there are volumes of statistics nowadays proving the new Ukrainian leader is joining a merry throng who have been in charge of many nations for centuries.

What do you think? Let me know once you have stopped laughing out loud.

Another yarn amusing many of us on this coast of the Wild Atlantic Way for the past month and more is that the major banks which have been robbing us for decades in various ways are now being robbed almost nightly themselves by highly-organized “customers” who, as ye will likely know already, are using stolen farm machinery to rip the banks’ ATMs out of the walls, driving them off into the night, emptying them of hundreds of thousands of ready cash, and then disappearing without the police forces being able to lay a finger on them.

Incredibly, none of the banks had equipped their cash machines with tracking devices which would have helped the cops catch the robbers. By the time the cash machines are discovered, they have been opened and emptied and the boys involved are on spending sprees and having a wild time for themselves, free as the birds.

Are any of you who have recently had harsh letters from your local bank manager about being overdrawn even slightly amused by that? Again let me know if you are smiling even a little bit.

Here’s something else that is amazingly true as Lent ends.  Thousands of Irish citizens, as is ritual by now, are flying out to the sunny coasts of Spain and Portugal, taking up holiday bookings they queued up for in our cold January season.

They are actually flying AWAY from the warmest and brightest weather in all of Europe as they departed our airports. Ireland had the highest temperatures and blazing sunshine over the bank holiday weekend here, something to do with a changed weather pattern.

There was even a mild earthquake reported off the coast of Donegal last week. Believe it or not. No damage was done at all and the news triggered an early influx of visitors which boosted tourism revenues around Tir Conaill.

Something else about the amusing changes in this New Ireland of yours and mine. I could have headed out through Killaloe and the sister town of Ballina on the Tipperary banks of the Shannon on Good Friday night because the public houses are now legally open on Good Friday for the first time in my life.

They say forbidden fruit is the sweetest, don’t they? Because it was, at last, legal and, frankly, because it was so warm and bright around home, I relaxed happily under my own roof, too lazily content to move a muscle.

Were any of you ever “found on” in a pub over here on a Good Friday night when, for sure, the pints tasted like manna from heaven just because they were illegal according to the laws of the land? Are a few of you smiling wryly now at the memory of what was then, indeed, a bit of craic?

It’s too warm now for me to bother writing any more. And I sincerely hope that, even for a wee while, a few of you out there forgot about the matters which, as promised, I never mentioned along the way. Slainte!

Read more: An Easter tale of lost love - a most passionate kiss on Good Friday