We've nurtured a strange relationship with the Gardai. Sometimes we sympathize with the high-risk and low-paying job they do every single day, tackling knife-wielding psychopaths to the ground to secure the same living wage as someone who's in charge of keeping the office printer stocked. But most of the time we deplore them for robbing hash and protecting greedy rich people from angry poor people.
The Gardai are finally going on strike to protest their woeful salary. There will be no guards on every Friday in the month of November. Nothing of this implication has happened since a collective Gardai sick day known as the "Blue Flu" in 1998.
Ireland is about to experience the kind of disorientation and subsequent self-examination that comes when the previously unattainable suddenly becomes attainable. What if there are no guards?
The biggest question you may have to ask yourself is, where will you be when the guards disappear? Will you lock yourself in until Saturday morning, quaking in the corner of your room and strangling the hilt of a kitchen knife. Or will you go among the animals, reveling in the lawless moonlight?
If you identify with the latter, but are too stupid to think of any good criminality to engage in, I've went and done you up a list.
1. Dress up as a guard and sexually bother every single bin in your town.
2. Eat a spice bag off the prescription counter of a chemists.
3. Ride your bicycle on the N11 and squirt a bottle of toilet duck at the cars stuck in traffic.
4. Slap a stone idol of Marty Morrissey's forehead with the sole of your shoe.
5. Write a self-help book titled "How to Make Your Dreams Come True" that contains only the words
"True Aryan Black Metal" on each page. Sell it for €5 from your car window.
6. Drive one of those mad bin trains on the right-hand side of the road. Be sure that you've rode each bin before you put the pedal down.
7. Obtain paints and canvases and charge people for 10 minute portraits of themselves. Paint every person to look just a little bit like post-orgasm Vladimir Lenin.
8. Publicly and violently flagellate any local musician who has performed the song "Wagon Wheel" at the pub. Let tattered flesh caution their ilk.
9. Disperse a Youth Defence rally while dressed as a completely fictitious child-eating goblin from Germanic folklore.
10. Hop Bono's fence, knock on his door, and explain to him in great detail how he will never again have the fortitude of character to write music as good as he did for the Batman Forever soundtrack.
11. Apprehend that overconfident bully 12-year-old that lives on your street and put him inside a wicker man.
12. Speak ill of the Church of Scientology.
13. Collect all of the golden rings.
14. Employ one of the thousand forms of Nyarlathotep in a horrifying blood-offering to his father Azathoth.
15. See how many lemongrass scented incense sticks you can fit inside your arse. Remember, there are no guards to stop you.
16. Create the conditions for a Lord of the Flies type scenario on the island of Inishmore.
17. Forcibly occupy Primark until they bring back flared jeans for men. None of this "it's kinda flared" arse jargon. I mean FLARED. Like a large cat could fit through the leg of it.
18. Find the off-duty guards and drink bottles upon bottles of Benylin Drowsy with them.
19. Slap the absolute skin off the chap that slagged your "side fringe" at the Porterhouse in Bray. It's called an 'asymmetrical bob cut', you horrible, thoughtless savage.
20. Start a new wave band called Le Petite Mort and record at least one monster single that propels you to the mainstream and into the hearts of the public. Use your newfound fame and influence to groom your fandom into an army hell-bent on shitting all over Rónán Mullen's car.
