Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

HIRA POTTER is Number One!

'Unbelievable!' - Pope John Paul II
'Sent shivers down my spine!' - Bill Clinton
'Sent shivers up mine!' - Padraig Pearse
'It's like déjà vu all over again!' - Art Garfunkel
'Congratulations!' - Phil Coulter
'All kinds of everything!' - Dana

Those were just some of the comments on the fastest-selling children's book of all time, the unauthorised, 'HIRA POTTER McGUINNESS: From Goons to Government' by L.K. Rolling (in the aisles). Set in a scary place called THE BOG it tells the story of HIRA, with his 'flickering, hooded pale blue eyes', beginning at the age of 16, elbow-deep in lambs' livers, pigs' kidneys, tripe and cows' brains, trying to discover the formula for BSE. His plan is to send meat parcels into the local barracks and turn the Queensmen into mad, gibbering beasts. This is to smooth the way for his plot to become Minister of Education - because THEY would not give him the Eleven-Plus - and metamorphose unsuspecting Protestant children into BOGSIDERS!

HIRA's first plan fails so he joins and manipulates the Civil Rights Monsters and in no time at all he has started THE TROUBLES! Things do not all go HIRA's way. He and his comrade, The Gimp McCann, plan to blow up a customs post on the Border but they are confronted by the Vegetarian Queensmen's. When later telling the story about that night, The Gimp recalls: 'We were outnumbered. I thought HIRA and I had no option but to turn and run back across the border. But when I looked around HIRA ran into a field and jumped onto a white horse. Then, bareback, he galloped off into the sunset. HIRA was back in the BOG before me.'

Parents with children of a sensitive nature are warned. This is a truly scary book, suggesting a world where planetary laws have been reversed and the sun sets in the east, if The Gimp's version is to be believed.

All of THE MONSTERS are throwbacks who live in THE DEEP PAST - with the exception of the non-sectarian, deposit-losing WIMPS, which HIRA mistakenly joins, but only for a year, when he first started THE TROUBLES. In 1972 he teams up with THE BEARD and others to form THE SECRET SEVEN and to mastermind THE WAR OF THE FLEAS. A man of many disguises and split personalities, twenty-five years later he is on tour in the USA, comparing himself to the legendary Art Garfunkel and raising dollars for THE PEACE PROCESS.

This is a story full of bugs, drugs, slugs and mugs and fly-fishing in Donegal. It is peopled by heroes like Sean THE MIGHTY MOUTH O'Callaghan, himself a former MINDLESS MONSTER, renowned for his stretched lips, his passion for THE REVISIONISTS but mostly his VAST INSIDE KNOWLEDGE of what HIRA and PIRA are thinking and planning.

THE MOUTH is prepared to come out of hiding and give the Queensmen the evidence they need to put HIRA away, but he remains under a cloud. By his own admission, THE MOUTH cannot remember any one person in the last ten years to whom he has consistently told the truth (though why we should believe him even when he is telling the truth about always lying is one of the unexplained paradoxes in this fantastic book.) In an earlier L.K. Rolling work THE MOUTH was described as 'having exaggerated his importance, invented plots which he had secretly foiled, and "borrowed" experiences from other people to broaden his appeal.'

So, if THE MOUTH cannot be mobilised is there nothing that can stop the embittered HIRA POTTER McGUINNESS's inexorable march of Protestant children into Irish-speaking RC schools? Have we left it too late to award the APPRENTICE BOG BUTCHER an honorary Eleven Plus certificate? Or is he beyond appeasement? There is only one way to find out!

The 'Andersonstown News' is selling copies of this doorstopper at a knockdown discount price of £20 and will be passing on your addresses.

We would like to point out that all characters in the above review are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any living person, dead or alive, in government or the IRA or who work for other newspapers. Pope John Paul II, Bill Clinton, Art Garfunkel, Phil Coulter and Dana are real people but we were only joking about what they said.

However, the actor, Sean THE MIGHTY MOUTH O'Callaghan, said everything-plus-more attributed to him or not.

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