The Irish news

My American readers might be blissfully unaware of any brouhahas going on in European circles, so I feel it's my duty as one more connected with things happening on the other side of the Atlantic to update you every now and then.

Thing is, it turned out a few weeks ago that some beefburgers for sale in an Irish supermarket were not all beef. In fact, they were as much as 30% horse. Everyone choked on their breakfast sausages and vegetarians all over the country had a quiet chuckle. The rest of Europe thought we were all big gombeen eejits for not realising we were eating the geegees - until it turned out that horsemeat (and possibly donkey) was being substituted for beef in frozen lasagnes and ready meals sold all over Europe, and in fact the Irish were the cleverclogs who had uncovered these horrible shenanigans, which are starting to look like a Sopranos-style scam of the highest order, lining the pockets of some very crafty somebodys somewhere. Probably somewhere on a beach in the Bahamas.

I'm on Twitter these days (follow me! there's a button over there ->), and it's interesting to see how much more immediate and reactive it seems to be than Facebook. There were suddenly a lot of tweets about people being so hungry they could eat a horse.

Meanwhile, of course, the Pope resigned. That was news everywhere, and there were plenty of memes going round Facebook about how he was giving up the papacy for Lent and how the Queen thought he was a big ol' wuss for throwing in the towel. The Irish meme brigade were out in force with Dougal from Father Ted; because when you've a national cultural icon that's suddenly relevant (sort of) to global news, you photoshop the heck out of that.

Source: http://gingerbrownies.com/

If you don't know what Father Ted is, you haven't been paying attention. Let's just say it's spawned more catchphrases for the Irish population than Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier put together.